Sick of annoying festive tunes? Too bad – the shopper inside you secretly loves seasonal schmaltz
IT IS dark and drizzly as I trudge around Manchester’s city centre on my annual pilgrimage for Christmas presents. The northern English weather, coupled with a distinct lack of inspiration, is not exactly enhancing my festive spirit.
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Nor is the music blaring from the shop fronts. Two shop managers seem to be engaged in a competitive restaging of the glam-rock battle for glory at the top of the 1973 UK Christmas charts. To my left, Wizzard with I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day. As if. To my right, Slade with Merry Xmas Everybody. Bah humbug. This Scrooge cuts his losses and heads for home.
There I begin to wonder whether I am alone in my aversion to festive background music. Gratifyingly, a brief web search suggests that I have at least one ally in Gottfried Rieser, spokesman for the Austrian trade union GPA-djp. In 2003, he claimed that , singling out Jingle Bells as apt to “arouse aggressive feelings”.
“Jingle Bells was singled out as apt to ‘arouse aggressive feelings’ among shop workers”
Some UK parliamentarians are on side, too. A House of Commons motion which read “This House notes the increasingly offensive playing of Christmas music in shops from October; and calls on all responsible retailers to show some taste and restraint and to limit their playing of such muzak to the month of December only” .
That did not have much of an effect. Retailers care about their bottom line, so they presumably have good reason to believe that, for most of us, festive tunes will send our spirits soaring, make us linger longer and pile our baskets high with expensive goodies. Or do they? Time to swap my Santa hat for my investigative deerstalker and find out.
On an anecdotal level, there is ample evidence to suggest that manipulating people’s acoustic environment influences their behaviour. Strangely, though, the most widely reported examples are where aural cues are used to discourage people from doing something undesirable. Take the . The brainchild of British inventor Howard Stapleton, it exploits the sad yet inescapable truth that as we age, our sensitivity to sound, and particularly high-pitched sound, decreases. By emitting a high-pitched whine at around 17,400 hertz, it creates an acoustic environment that is acutely uncomfortable for loitering teenagers yet perfectly acceptable to well-behaved adults.
That makes it a highly controversial technology, says my colleague of the University of Salford’s Design Against Crime Solution Centre. “It is seen as being quite Orwellian, and has been flagged up as infringing human rights,” he says. It is also a rare example where there is a good physiological reason for believing an acoustic conditioning technique is effective.
Can background music have a more subtle, psychological effect based not on hearing acuity, but fashion and taste? The use in the UK and Australia of easy-listening music to disperse teenagers – unkindly dubbed the “” – is backed by some circumstantial evidence that it does work. In 2007, the Co-op supermarket chain in the UK experimented with playing classical music outside 105 of its stores, and . Train stations on the London Underground have played Mozart to discourage loitering by disaffected youth, and the use of classical music as a sonic deterrent . “It is seen as a softer way of dispersing teenagers and more acceptable than the Mosquito,” says Wootton.
Hard evidence to back up those claims seems thin on the ground, but never mind – they support my thesis splendidly. Play people music they don’t like, and it’s a sure way to have them scuttling for the exit.
As I rifle through the literature, though, things become more complicated. No one seems to have investigated the psychological damage or otherwise wreaked by Christmas schmaltz, but a steady trickle of scientific studies over the past few decades has shown how certain aspects of music can influence our psyches in all sorts of contexts (see “Sound FX”).
As far as consumer behaviour is concerned, musical tempo seems to have a definite effect. In a classic study in 1982, of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green showed that supermarket shoppers stayed longer and spent 38 per cent more money when slow background music was on than when faster tunes were playing (Journal of Marketing, vol 46, p 86). Studies since then have confirmed similar effects in restaurants and bars. Even the number of bites per minute taken by diners in a university cafeteria appears to be influenced by the tempo of the ambient music ().
Musical genre also seems to have surprising powers of suggestion. Over a two-week period in 1998, and his colleagues at the University of Leicester, UK, played French and German music on alternate days in a local supermarket displaying French and German wines. On the days when French accordion music was playing, French wines outsold German wines by a factor of 5 to 1; when German oompah music was playing, German wines outsold French wines by 2 to 1 ().
Sometimes subconscious associations seem to appeal to a near-synaesthetic sense in all of us. In 2009, for example, of the University of Oxford investigated the mental connections we make between different tastes and sounds of varying pitch. Sweet and sour tastes consistently bring high-pitched notes to our minds, whereas bitter tastes tend to be associated with low-pitched brass and woodwind sounds . On the strength of that research, the UK division of Starbucks commissioned a special piece of to put its customers in a receptive mood.
All in all, the evidence seems to indicate that background music has merit from a retailer’s perspective. In 2006, Francine Garlin and Katherine Owen of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, conducted a meta-analysis of 32 studies investigating its effects on consumer behaviour. They concluded that background music had “small-to-moderate, yet quite robust effects… [on] value returns, behaviour duration and affective response” ().
Humans can be fickle, though, and there is much we do not know about our responses to acoustic conditioning, says North, who is now a psychologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. “It isn’t as though anyone has sent someone shopping with an electrode in the brain or similar,” he says.
What we can say with reasonable certainty is that shopkeepers should be careful in their choice of music. “If you are trying to make people feel festive, sure, pick Christmas music, but don’t pick music which makes already crowded premises feel even more frantic,” says North. “It is about picking the right music to achieve the right effect.”
So does that give shops carte blanche for blanket White Christmas? That might not be a bad tactic, suggests my University of Salford colleague , who investigates soundscapes. Hearing evolved as an early warning system, alerting us to threats, so as with any new noise we are instantly aware of changes to background music. “While the brain has a powerful ability to get used to constant noise, music has so much information in it that it is harder to habituate to,” he says. To prevent cognitive overload, shopkeepers might be better off limiting themselves to quieter, less frenzied tunes that we can more easily ignore.
But they shouldn’t feel they have to. Davies has investigated the soundscape of Oxford Street in London, which has become a byword for pre-Christmas shopping mayhem. “Some participants cited Oxford Street as a positive soundscape because they liked the hustle and bustle while shopping, but they also appreciated being able to control their noise exposure by escaping down the quiet side streets,” he says.
Amen to that. And for the ultimate in controlled noise exposure, I’m off to do some internet shopping. But first, a little bit of background music to put me in the mood…
Sound FX
Nellie the training aid
Heart-attack victims in the UK who are revived using cardiopulmonary resuscitation should not be surprised to come round to the hummed tune of Ralph Butler and Peter Hart’s 1956 children’s classic Nellie the Elephant. Its solid rhythm and tempo of around 100 beats a minute have led to its use as an aid in teaching hospitals to regularise the rate of chest compression during CPR.
This is a classic example of the phenomenon of “entrainment”, in which oscillations in our brain change to match the rhythm of the music we are listening to and the body is prompted to move in time to the beat. In this case, the results are perhaps not entirely helpful. In 2009, and his colleagues at the University of Coventry, UK, showed that listening to Nellie the Elephant got significantly more paramedics delivering compressions at the right speed, but it also led them to push more shallowly. They recommended that the use of the song as a learning aid should be discontinued .
Careless music costs lives
What music should accompany you on a long car journey? It might be down to more than just personal taste, says Warren Brodsky at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. If you want to arrive, you should choose slower-paced tunes.
Brodsky put 28 students through their paces on a driving simulator while listening to music of different tempos. With faster-paced music, he found, the subjects were significantly more likely to take risks by jumping red lights, for example.
The reason usually given for such effects is that drivers are distracted by the pumping beat, but that is probably an oversimplification, says Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. For example, drivers feeling drowsy on long drives might turn up the beats to keep awake. “But if you need music to keep you awake, you probably should not be driving in the first place,” he points out.
Milking it
We might like to think we are uniquely cultured, but evidence from the cattle stall suggests we humans are not the only animals to respond to music. Country music – what else? – has been shown to be more effective in encouraging cattle to enter the milking parlour but, once the cows are inside, their milk yields are best improved by playing them soothing classical music.
Similarly, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik increased growth and improved carcass and fatty acid composition in common carp, while middle-of-the-road classical music reduced stress-induced behaviour such as pacing and weaving in zoo-housed Asian elephants. Quite what the animals are responding to – whether a masking effect to other extraneous noise, or an enriching neurophysiological effect – remains unclear (, vol 118, p 1).
