Bothered by Loud Music in Restaurants?

Question

Am I the only one who is bothered by loud music playing in restaurants (and bars)?In the past couple of months, I noticed that nearly every restaurant I go to plays music in the background. Oftentimes so loud that it hinders conversations. The latter is the reason why I am going to a restaurant in the first place. Even worse, it seems like one can not even sit outside and enjoy the sun anymore without the venue blasting music on the patio.I am considering creating a crowdsourced website that lists whether or not a restaurant/bar plays music (maybe even generally the loudness level). Is there interest in contributing to such a site from the HN community?

lahvak · Accepted Answer

When you are running a successful restaurant that is always full, the last thing you want is for people to sit around having conversations. You want them to quickly eat and drink their fill and get out so another customer can take their place. On the other hand, when your place is half empty, either because it is not so popular or because it is not busy time, you want to keep present customers there as long as you can. Even if their are sitting there nursing the one beer, there is always a chance they will order another one or get a snack or a coffee. Your solution is obviously going to bad unpopular places, or going at times when not too many people eat.Joking aside, it is possible that this has recently gotten worse due to reduced capacity associated with social distancing.

scantis · Answer

General loudness has limits since it can damage hearing, assume we are always below discomfort using damping if necessary. It is said that 6dB SNR would be enough to still follow a conversation, but there seem to be some exceptions to this. Even if the system, ear, drum, hammer, cochlea and nerves are fully intact, older people seem to sometimes loose the ability to differentiate properly between different sources. I don't assume you are old, this effect is quite complicated. I don't use a hearing aid, but I foolishly assume it will not improve SNR only general loudness. Like most amplifiers would.
There are some known exceptions, such as musicians, who can differentiate quite well. Which lets us assume, we can better this by training hearing properly.
For this music seems to be a key, since you can try to focus on specific parts like single instrument and try to ignore others, even though they are all present. This is done by the calculative power of our brain and happens in the signal processing stage of it. Not a hardware problem. It even uses additional information.
During the pandemic lots of people wore masks and I had trouble understanding many of them well. This isn't mainly a SNR problem, for me to get good differeniation seeing the persons mouth helps.
Sometimes I don't understand what people say, they repeat it and repeat it until my brain moves to the right place and everything is immediately clear.
I enjoy the occasional industrial death metal concert, here I noticed even with earplugs, shutting you ears with your hands, you can very well hear what a friend yells directly at you. Construction worker with earmuffs using insanely loud equipment, still exchange information by yelling. So even if an insane amount of noise is present and then damped to safe levels, direct communication is viable if SNR is good enough.
The problem is the processing stage, which requires additional training.
At least that is my theory. I assume loudness in public is at appropriate levels otherwise people would complain.

WalterGR · Answer

> In the past couple of monthsHow frequently were you going to restaurants before then?It's possible that by isolating ourselves during COVID we've forgotten what some things are and were like.