What is Pipedown?

ACCORDING TO a 1997 Sunday Times poll, when people were asked what was `the single thing they most detested about modern life', piped music came third on the list. I'd like to think it's moved up since then, as piped music, or CAN - `captive audience network', as it's officially called - has become even more ubiquitous, making life near-intolerable in restaurants, pubs, cafés, foyers, swimming pools, gyms, shops (posh shops and cheap shops, including most bookshops), hairdressers, hospitals' and doctors' waiting rooms, airports and aeroplanes and now, I can hardly believe it, BANKS: intolerable to anyone with any hearing left, who still likes to choose their own music or likes silence (or even just a quiet chat).

My bank has recently installed piped music in their branches. When I complained to the manager, she said that they had done a survey amongst their customers who had overwhelmingly agreed that piped music alleviates the boredom of standing in line and makes them feel less anxious about the anticipated consultation with the bank clerk. What did we do before piped music? I asked her, but by her expression I realised that she hadn't been around then and couldn't imagine what we did in a quiet bank. I've banked with them for over thirty years but I can no longer talk to a real person on the phone at the bank, so I'm planning to end the relationship in silent bitterness and fury. I feel like André Previn who, apparently, was on board an aircraft during an emergency, and when the pilot piped `soothing' music through the plane's public address system, he complained to the stewardess saying, `I refuse to die to this music'.

Some people are benefiting, however. It seems that `interminable loops of the same music' earn the Performing Rights Society over £242 million a year because every outlet must have a licence from them. That means that every meal we eat, book we buy, service we use has an extra cost attached to it from this near-universal modern scourge.

Piped music is unchosen by customers and, in many cases, it is out of their control to prevent it. I have often begged the people serving me in bookshops or restaurants to turn it off or down, only to be told it's impossible as it's on a system which the `global owners' have insisted on and paid for. I'm not sure whether that's just an excuse but it may be true of the chains. Small independent shops can create their own music loops from iPods and the Internet, but you're still being forced to listen to someone else's choice of music, usually played so loud you can't think or talk.

There is a wonderful organisation called PIPEDOWN campaigning against this thing. When you join them for a very small amount of money (£15 a year), they send you small cards you can hand out to places where you've hated the muzak intrusion and won't be coming back, or other small cards where you've noticed that there's a glorious silence and you want to thank the establishment. It's supported by several musicians - Alfred Brendel, Simon Rattle, Gillian Weir etc. - as well as actors, writers and broadcasters, and thousands of others around he country, although I'm afraid that I didn't spot any young pop musicians on their list of patrons.

When I was young, my parents sang and played, and taught us to sing for ourselves: `the songs came from our own lips, not out of a box', as Flora Thompson puts it. It feels as if singing for ourselves, and not just listening to others, has been stolen from us by the electrical music industry, and all we have left is karaoke - which, I see from the OED, is from the Japanese meaning `empty orchestra'.