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How Restaurants Got So Loud

theatlantic.com

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Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#61

Post by pcarolan »

I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional.

Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designed from the ground up to facilitate work. It has tons of natural light, freely available whiteboards and almost no music call Limitless coffee. It is such a joy to not have to deal with the din that I go there even when I'm not working. You can almost hear yourself think.

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#62

Post by mnw21cam »

erdo wrote: post #3

This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)

The Met Office in the UK has a canteen, and at one point, they decided that it was too noisy. Their solution was to make a load of person-sized wool "clouds", and hang them from the ceiling. They look cool, and they absorb noise.

A couple of months ago, I went to a conference in San Diego, and went to a restaurant in the evening with colleagues. We could hardly hear the person next to us shouting. I left as soon as I had eaten.

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#64

Post by mnw21cam »

fredley wrote: post #57
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mechanism is supposed to be that you talk less, which in turn means you drink more. Places serving food have piped music so you finish your meal more quickly so they sell more covers; you're unlikely to sit around chatting afterwards with music playing. They also clear plates at the earliest chance providing an enhanced social pressure to finish.

My partner and I are 'mystery shoppers' for restaurants. We have our bill covered plus a bit extra on top (but have to fill out hefty, detailed questionnaires afterwards). One of the things there's always a whole section on is timing: every single interaction has a time-window in which it must occur. You must be greeted within (t1), you must be seated within (t2). Plates must be cleared within (t3), you must have a '…

I personally hate it when a waiter comes up, interrupts my meal, and asks if everything is OK with my food. Are you seriously saying restaurants are being encouraged to do this?

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#65

Post by JohnBooty »

willvarfar wrote: post #15
tapland wrote: post #6

Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year. It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the build…

I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.) What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains ha…

Yeah, I'm a big fan of spaces that feature both "noisy" public spaces as well as quieter private spaces. I worked at an offie with such an arrangement and it was quite nice.

There's really no reason why there can't be both, especially a library.

In fact a lot of libraries do exactly this, don't they?

Typical library arrangement, at least here in America:

- Center of library has long tables with multiple seats; can be used for group interaction - Sides of library have all the bookshelves - Between the bookshelves and the outer wall there are more private desks. It's naturally quite quiet here because even if the central "public" area is noisy, you have all the bookshelves between you and the central area

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#66

Post by toomanybeersies »

erdo wrote: post #3

This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)

The concept of a quiet bar just seems weird to me.

The problem with most bars isn't actually the volume of the music, but the loudness. The speakers are generally cheap speakers that are undersized and are then cranked so loud they're redlining and sound like shit.

I can stand in the middle of a nightclub with a well set up speaker system and have a conversation with a friend. Yet in most bars and pubs, which are places where I'd actually like to have a conversation, I have to shout at my mates and can barely hear a word they say.

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#67

Post by JohnBooty »

sgift wrote: post #40
eponeponepon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck taking a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio away to read quietly at home.

Comparing a city library with an extremely specialized institution which holds a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio is ridiculous. These are separate institutions which only share the name library.

Yeah that's kind of the problem with this entire discussion. People are discussing entirely different sorts of libraries.

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#68

Post by JohnBooty »

Alreadyobsolete wrote: post #2

It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.

Yeah, my hearing's not the best and I really just cannot hear what people are saying half of the time. It's like... everybody's struggling to hear each other, but I really cannot hear. I just can't do those kinds of spaces, at least not if I want to have a conversation.

Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud

#70

Post by fnordsensei »

Illniyar wrote: post #33
keiferski wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libraries are not playgrounds. This idea that the primary functional purpose of an important space should be some kind of afterthought is rather depressing, but I guess is follows from the entertainment-centric culture we live in. The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.

The purpose of libraries has been completely ousted by the internet. It is no longer a place that makes vast knowledge attainable to the average person, that's the internet now. You can either have no libraries at all or libraries that cater to a different purpose, one that they can offer better then your phone.

The idea behind libraries is that a minimum of knowledge should be accessible to everyone.

For what it's worth, there's still a lot of information you can acquire legally and for free from a library that you can't get both legally and for free from the internet.

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