The volume of music 'can affect the volume you drink'

Published on Friday 18 July 2008 22:05

LOUD music in bars and pubs makes people drink more heavily and quickly, a study revealed yesterday.

Researchers said that venues were always well aware of the impact of the environment on their patrons in terms of how long they stayed and what they consumed.

But now it seems that the volume of the music played in the establishment could be crucial to boosting sales.

As part of the study, researchers visited bars in the west of France on three Saturday evenings and observed a group of 40 young men and their drinking habits.

The researchers, writing in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, also measured volume levels in the bars.

The team found that the higher the sound levels, the more the men tended to drink and in a shorter space of time.

Previous research has also found that fast music can cause fast drinking, while having music on in a venue prompts punters to spend more time in the bar than they would if there was no music playing.

The researchers, led by Professor Nicolas Gueguen, suggested two explanations as to why the loud music could have caused people to drink more and drink faster.

"In agreement with previous research on music, food and drink, high sound levels may have caused higher arousal, which led the subjects to drink faster and to order more drinks," Prof Gueguen said.

"Loud music may have had a negative effect on social interaction in the bar, so that patrons drank more because they talked less."

The researchers said they had shown that loud music had an effect on how much people drank, which had implications for combating deaths from alcohol abuse.

In Scotland, alcohol misuse is estimated to cost 2.25 billion a year, leading to thousands of deaths and damaging many more lives.

"We need to encourage bar owners to play music at more of a moderate level… and make consumers aware that loud music can influence their alcohol consumption," the researchers said.