Music to Soothe Savage Souls

Right alongside the old urban legend that listening to Mozart would boost your intelligence comes a new proposition: that the "Haffner" is also good for getting loitering "youfs" to move on from where they aren't wanted.

Co-op, a chain of grocery stores, is experimenting with playing classical music outside its shops, to stop youths from hanging around and intimidating customers. It seems to work well. Staff have a remote control and “can turn the music on if there's a situation developing and they need to disperse people”, says Steve Broughton of Co-op.

The most extensive use of aural policing so far, though, has been in underground stations. Six stops on the Tyneside Metro currently pump out Haydn and Mozart to deter vandals and loiterers, and the scheme has been so successful that it has spawned imitators. After a pilot at Elm Park station on the London Underground, classical music now fills 30 other stations on the network. The most effective deterrents, according to a spokesman for Transport for London, are anything sung by Pavarotti or written by Mozart.

Needless to say, I don't believe that such measures will have any long-term positive impact in terms of deterring menacing teenagers, whatever other benefits playing Mozart might bestow on shoppers and Underground travellers. If anything, I have a feeling that it'll probably encourage a few punks to simply use the music as a background score to their misbehavior, a la "A Clockwork Orange."

One other thing I can't help asking myself: why is it that people keep casting about for miraculous powers that the music of Mozart and Beethoven might possess? What superstitious impulse compels people to fall for such nonsense? I suspect that it's the same reactionary tendency that pushes certain individuals to assert that the decline of Western civilization was fore-ordained once schoolchildren stopped having to study the Nicomachean Ethics in the original Greek.

[Via Kevin Drum.]

Comments

[Kevin Donoghue]

Maybe "loitering youfs" move on because they hate the sound of Mozart? I know I get my shopping done faster in December because I have to get away from those disco versions of Christmas carols they pipe into the supermarket.

[Andrew]

I think Kevin is right - you may have misunderstood the way this Mozart repulsion works. It's supposed to be annoying, not soothing. Anyway, from the excerpt, it looks like it's not so much wishful thinking as something they've hit upon that, weirdly enough, actually works. (You're right that the Mozart-IQ connection is bunk though.)

[Abiola Lapite]

The precise mechanism isn't all that important - the key thing is that kids will eventualy get used to this "annoying" music, just as people can get used to almost anything right up to the sight and smell of decomposing corpses. It may "work" for the moment, but its effectiveness is guaranteed to disappear as the novelty wears off.

[chris w]

They did that in the decaying downtown mall area in Eugene, Oregon before they finally put a street through it. The local newspaper interviewed the local street kids, and one girl responded that she didn't mind at all and that her pet rat enjoyed the music.

[Factory]

A problem with these kind of systems is that they annoy _anyone_ who dislikes the music, even legitimate customers. I have to say that I are quite annoyed by it, hmm maybe if they played some Aphex Twin. (but that would scare away all the other customers :)

[will]

Stores will often have tried dozends of ways to prevent youths and other people to hang around their buildings and potentially cause mischief. Trying music is pretty cheap and may be effective, even if it is only for a short period. By that time, they'll just hope there's something new to try.

[Gareth]

There's nothing new about this. I remember a 7-11 in my hometown using light baroque to get rid of adolescent loiterers a decade-and-a-half ago. It worked in the sense that the place became uncool to hang around, but the store is no longer in business.