It's impressive to me how very sensitive folks are to music--I agree that muzak is annoying and really loud muzak really annoying, but in general it doesn't bother me too much. I kind of get an existential kick out of seeing what sort of music is being played at the grocery store--when I go into the up-scale "natural foods" store in my neighborhood, the music playing is apt to be an eclectic but always self-consciously tasteful mix: Enya followed by tejano followed by Dave Brubeck. Starbucks drove me a little nuts this winter when they began playing Christmas music the day after Halloween (I know, that's what I get for going into Starbucks)--it was all 50s and 60s stuff. I have asked to have the music turned down in restaurants when it was so loud it was oppressive, and sometimes it was actually turned down. Recently, I ate at a restaurant where the person waiting on me was deaf and I realized afterward that perhaps she had the music up loud because then she could feel the bass--it was the middle of the afternoon and I was the only person in the place.

However, I would like to suggest that as a group, musicians and afficianados are more attuned, as it were, to how music affects them--it's both a blessing and a curse, I think, to be so exquisitely wired that any sound registers as either pleasure or pain. Just realize that not everybody is wired this way--incredible as it may seem, not everybody experiences music as an event or as something existing in space, as significant (hence the blank looks when one requests the sound to be lowered--the blank individual may think such a request is crazy because if the music were turned down no one would "hear" it). Oliver Sachs (of Awakenings fame) describes the sensitivity that music lovers have as being able to perceive musical notes in the same way that others remember faces--the notes have color, shape, personalities.

blt