The Last Sense Left to Chance

The sense left to chance

Walk through any serious hotel, spa, or restaurant and you can read the intent in almost everything. The weight of the door. The colour rendering of the lamps. The scent in the corridor, briefed and specified. These decisions are made once, deliberately, by people who understand what the space is for.

Sound rarely gets that treatment. It is licensed rather than designed, generic rather than specific, and identical at 7am and 11pm. The same venue that would never hang stock photography will play stock music for a decade.

This is a strange omission, because sound is the one atmospheric channel guests cannot close. Eyes can rest. Sound arrives regardless. And the research record on what it does to behavior is longer and more consistent than most operators expect.

How music affects guest behavior: the weight of the evidence

The question has been studied experimentally since the early 1980s, and the individual findings now hold up at the meta-analytic level.

A meta-analysis in the Journal of Retailing pooled 66 studies and 135 effects across roughly 15,600 participants. The presence of music or ambient scent, compared with none, reliably raised pleasure, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions (Roschk et al., 2017). An earlier meta-analytic review reached a compatible conclusion for retail specifically: background music affects sales and patronage intention, both actual and perceived time spent, and arousal and pleasure, with tempo and genre acting as significant moderators (Garlin & Owen, 2006).

The founding field experiment remains instructive. Milliman played slow-tempo and fast-tempo music in a supermarket and measured what shoppers did. Under slow music, the pace of in-store traffic slowed, and daily gross sales were higher than under fast music (Milliman, 1982). Nothing about the products changed. Only the tempo did.

Design is the lever

The most useful recent finding for anyone who runs a physical space is also the most specific. A 2022 meta-analysis in the Journal of Business Research examined 56 studies and 209 effects in tourism and hospitality settings, across five distinct dimensions of music. Its conclusion: it is not so much the presence of music that influences customers, but its design (Trompeta et al., 2022). Whether a venue plays something matters far less than what, and whether it fits.

Fit is measurable. In a British supermarket, French accordion music on the shelf-end display led French wine to outsell German; German music reversed the result (North et al., 1997). The follow-up in the Journal of Applied Psychology confirmed the effect under peer review: the national character of the music significantly shifted which wines customers bought (North et al., 1999).

Fit also moves guests up the price ladder, not just sideways. In a wine store, classical music, compared with Top-40, did not change how many bottles shoppers bought. It changed which bottles. Customers selected more expensive wine (Areni & Kim, 1993). The music did not sell more product. It repositioned the product around it.

The music did not sell more product. It repositioned the product around it.

Influence below awareness

The wine studies carry a second finding that matters as much as the first. When North's shoppers were asked afterward whether the music had influenced their choice, they denied it (North et al., 1997). Milliman's supermarket shoppers were likewise largely unaware that tempo had changed their pace (Milliman, 1982).

This is why sound is easy to neglect. A guest will comment on a scratchy towel or a dim room. Almost no guest will attribute a decision, or a mood, to the sound of the space. The influence is real and the feedback is silent. Operators who wait for complaints about generic audio will wait forever, while the effect runs anyway, in whatever direction the playlist happens to point.

The influence is real, and the feedback is silent.

Does music change dwell time and spend?

The restaurant evidence says yes, in both directions of the dial.

Milliman returned to the question in a restaurant setting and found that slow-tempo background music lengthened dining time relative to fast-tempo music. Food spend did not differ significantly between conditions, but the longer stay produced a substantial increase in bar and beverage spend (Milliman, 1986). Secondary literature widely reports the figures as roughly 56 versus 45 minutes at table and on the order of 40 percent more spent on drinks under slow music; those specific numbers circulate beyond the primary text and should be read as widely reported rather than settled, but the direction and the mechanism are the published finding.

Musical style moves the bill as well. Across 18 evenings in a working restaurant, classical music produced significantly higher customer spend than both pop music and no music, with the effect visible in starters, coffee, and total food spend (North et al., 2003). Per-head currency figures from that study are often quoted; we treat them cautiously here, but the effect itself was significant in a real venue over real service.

Sound also changes time a guest would otherwise resent. In a study of waiting for service, music improved the emotional evaluation of the environment, which in turn drove approach behavior toward the service organization, and music the customer liked produced a more positive response to the wait than music they disliked (Hui et al., 1997). The queue at check-in and the pause in the treatment lounge are not dead time. They are atmosphere, experienced at full attention.

The wellness case, measured carefully

For spas and wellness venues, the relevant literature is about stress recovery and reported affect. It should be described in exactly those terms, so we will.

In a controlled laboratory study, 40 participants completed a stress task and then sat in one of four sound environments. Physiological stress recovery, measured by skin conductance, was faster during nature sounds than during environmental noise. A second measure, heart-rate variability, showed no significant effect (Alvarsson et al., 2010). That is the honest shape of the finding: one physiological marker of recovery moved, one did not.

At the synthesis level, a meta-analysis in PNAS pooled 18 studies of natural sound. Natural sounds decreased stress and annoyance with a combined effect size of g = -0.60, and improved health-relevant and positive-affect outcomes at g = 1.63. Water sounds showed the largest effect on positive affect; bird sounds showed the largest on lowering stress (Buxton et al., 2021). Effect sizes of that magnitude are uncommon in environmental research.

Clinical settings offer a bounded, well-audited data point. A Cochrane review of music interventions before surgery concluded that listening to pre-recorded music may reduce preoperative anxiety, with some included studies reporting lower salivary cortisol (Bradt & Dileo, 2013). None of this makes sound a treatment, and we do not claim it is one. What the evidence supports is narrower and still valuable: the acoustic environment measurably shapes how quickly people settle and how they report feeling. For a business whose product is how people feel, that is the point.

What this means for a venue

Read together, the literature supports a small number of operational conclusions.

First, sound is already changing your guests' pace, mood, and spend. There is no neutral setting. A generic playlist is a design decision made by someone who has never seen your space.

Second, the returns come from design choices, not from volume of content. Tempo sets pace and dwell (Milliman, 1982; 1986). Style repositions price perception (Areni & Kim, 1993; North et al., 2003). Congruence with the brand and the moment steers choice (North et al., 1999; Trompeta et al., 2022). For calm-led venues, natural sound has measured effects on stress recovery and affect (Alvarsson et al., 2010; Buxton et al., 2021).

Third, guests will never tell you this is happening. The effect runs below awareness, which means it rewards the operator willing to treat sound with the same specificity as light and material, before anyone asks for it.

Few atmospheric investments have this much published behavioral evidence behind them. Fewer still are this widely ignored.

How Madori approaches sonic identity

Madori composes an original sonic identity for a physical space. It is owned outright and royalty-free, so the venue is not renting its own atmosphere back from a licensing pool. It is generative, so it never loops and never becomes the track a regular guest has heard forty times. And it is designed against the variables the research says matter: the brand's character, each zone's function, and the hour of the day, from the first arrival to the last table.

We are careful about what we promise. The studies above establish direction and mechanism, not a guaranteed percentage for any given room; every space, clientele, and service pattern differs. What the evidence does establish is that sound is a designed input with measurable behavioral output, and that leaving it to chance is the only option with no case behind it.

References

1. Trompeta, M.-A., Karantinou, K., Koritos, C., & Bijmolt, T. H. A. (2022). "A meta-analysis of the effects of music in tourism and hospitality settings." Journal of Business Research, 138, 130-145. doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.08.067
2. Roschk, H., Loureiro, S. M. C., & Breitsohl, J. (2017). "Calibrating 30 Years of Experimental Research: A Meta-Analysis of the Atmospheric Effects of Music, Scent, and Color." Journal of Retailing, 93(2), 228-240. doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2016.10.001
3. Garlin, F. V., & Owen, K. (2006). "Setting the tone with the tune: A meta-analytic review of the effects of background music in retail settings." Journal of Business Research, 59(6), 755-764. doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.01.013
4. Buxton, R. T., Pearson, A. L., Allou, C., Fristrup, K., & Wittemyer, G. (2021). "A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks." PNAS, 118(14), e2013097118. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013097118
5. Milliman, R. E. (1982). "Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket Shoppers." Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86-91. doi.org/10.1177/002224298204600313
6. Milliman, R. E. (1986). "The Influence of Background Music on the Behavior of Restaurant Patrons." Journal of Consumer Research, 13(2), 286-289. doi.org/10.1086/209068
7. North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & McKendrick, J. (1997). "In-store music affects product choice." Nature, 390(6656), 132. doi.org/10.1038/36484
8. North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & McKendrick, J. (1999). "The influence of in-store music on wine selections." Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(2), 271-276. doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.2.271
9. Areni, C. S., & Kim, D. (1993). "The Influence of Background Music on Shopping Behavior: Classical Versus Top-Forty Music in a Wine Store." Advances in Consumer Research, 20, 336-340. www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/7467/volumes/v20/NA-200
10. North, A. C., Shilcock, A., & Hargreaves, D. J. (2003). "The Effect of Musical Style on Restaurant Customers’ Spending." Environment and Behavior, 35(5), 712-718. doi.org/10.1177/0013916503254749
11. Hui, M. K., Dubé, L., & Chebat, J.-C. (1997). "The Impact of Music on Consumers’ Reactions to Waiting for Services." Journal of Retailing, 73(1), 87-104. doi.org/10.1016/S0022-4359(97)90016-6
12. Alvarsson, J. J., Wiens, S., & Nilsson, M. E. (2010). "Stress Recovery during Exposure to Nature Sound and Environmental Noise." IJERPH, 7(3), 1036-1046. doi.org/10.3390/ijerph7031036
13. Bradt, J., & Dileo, C. (2013). "Music interventions for preoperative anxiety." Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD006908. doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006908.pub2