I’m confident enough in this take to write it as a PSA: playing music at medium-size-or-larger gatherings is a Chesterton’s Fence situation.
It serves the very important function of reducing average conversation size: the louder the music, the more groups naturally split into smaller groups, as people on the far end develop a (usually unconscious) common knowledge that it’s too much effort to keep participating in the big one and they can start a new conversation without being unduly disruptive.
If you’ve ever been at a party with no music where people gravitate towards a single (or handful of) group of 8+ people, you’ve experienced the failure mode that this solves: usually these conversations are then actually conversations of 2-3 people with 5-6 observers, which is usually unpleasant for the observers and does not facilitate close interactions that easily lead to getting to know people.
By making it hard to have bigger conversations, the music naturally produces smaller ones; you can modulate the volume to have the desired effect on a typical discussion size. Quiet music (e.g. at many dinner parties) makes it hard to have conversations bigger than ~4-5, which is already a big improvement. Medium-volume music (think many bars) facilitates easy conversations of 2-3. The extreme end of this is dance clubs, where very loud music (not coincidentally!) makes it impossible to maintain conversations bigger than 2.
I suspect that high-decoupler hosts are just not in the habit of thinking “it’s a party, therefore I should put music on,” or even actively think “music makes it harder to talk and hear each other, and after all isn’t that the point of a party?” But it’s a very well-established cultural practice to play music at large gatherings, so, per Chesterton’s Fence, you need to understand what function it plays. The function it plays is to stop the party-destroying phenomenon of big group conversations.
As having gone to Lighthaven, does this still feel marginally worth it at Lighthaven where we mostly tried to make it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations? I can see the case for music here, but like, I do think music makes it harder to talk to people (especially on the louder end) and that does seem like a substantial cost to me.
Talking 1-1 with music is so difficult to me that I don’t enjoy a place if there’s music. I expect many people on/towards the spectrum could be similar.
Having been at two LH parties, one with music and one without, I definitely ended up in the “large conversation with 2 people talking and 5 people listening”-situation much more in the party without music.
That said, I did find it much easier to meet new people at the party without music, as this also makes it much easier to join conversations that sound interesting when you walk past (being able to actually overhear them).
This might be one of the reasons why people tend to progressively increase the volume of the music during parties. First give people a chance to meet interesting people and easily join conversations. Then increase the volume to facilitate smaller conversations.
Yeah, when there’s loud music it’s much easier for me to understand people I know than people I don’t because I’m already used to their speaking patterns, and can more easily infer what they said even when I don’t hear it perfectly. And also because any misunderstanding or difficulty that rises out of not hearing each other well is less awkward with someone I already know than someone I do.
As someone who’s spent meaningful amounts of time at LH during parties, absolutely yes. You successfully made it architecturally awkward to have large conversations, but that’s often cashed out as “there’s a giant conversation group in and totally blocking [the Entry Hallway Room of Aumann]/[the lawn between A&B]/[one or another firepit and its surrounding walkways]; that conversation group is suffering from the obvious described failure modes, but no one in it is sufficiently confident or agentic or charismatic to successfully break out into a subgroup/subconversation.
I’d recommend quiet music during parties? Or maybe even just a soundtrack of natural noises—birdsong and wind? rain and thunder? - to serve the purpose instead.
@habryka Forgot to comment on the changes you implemented for soundscape at LH during the mixer—possibly you may want to put a speaker in the Bayes window overlooking the courtyard firepit. People started congregating/pooling there (and notably not at the other firepit next to it!) because it was the locally-quietest location, and then the usual failure modes of an attempted 12-person conversation ensued.
Seems cheap to get the info value, especially for quieter music? Can be expensive to set up a multi-room sound system, but it’s probably most valuable in the room that is largest/most prone to large group formation, so maybe worth experimenting with a speaker playing some instrumental jazz or something. I do think the architecture does a fair bit of work already.
I’m being slightly off-topic here, but how does one “makes it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations”? More broadly, the topic of designing spaces where people can think better/do cooler stuff/etc. is fascinating, but I don’t know where to learn more than the very basics of it. Do you know good books, articles, etc. on these questions, by any chance?
Thanks! I knew of Alexander, but you reminded me that I’ve been procrastinating on tackling the 1,200+ pages of A Pattern Language for a few months, and I’ve now started reading it :-)
Was one giant cluster last two times I was there. In the outside area. Not sure why the physical space arrangement wasn’t working. I guess walking into a cubby feels risky/imposing, and leaving feels rude. I would have liked it to work.
I’m not sure how you could improve it. I was trying to think of something last time I was there. “Damn all these nice cubbies are empty.” I could not think of anything.
I agree music has this effect, but I think the Fence is mostly because it also hugely influences the mood of the gathering, i.e. of the type and correlatedness of people’s emotional states.
(Music also has some costs, although I think most of these aren’t actually due to the music itself and can be avoided with proper acoustical treatment. E.g. people sometimes perceive music as too loud because the emitted volume is literally too high, but ime people often say this when the noise is actually overwhelming for other reasons, like echo (insofar as walls/floor/ceiling are near/hard/parallel), or bass traps/standing waves (such that the peak amplitude of the perceived wave is above the painfully loud limit, even though the average amplitude is fine; in the worst cases, this can result in barely being able to hear the music while simultaneously perceiving it as painfully loud!)
Gatherings with generous alcohol drinking tend to have louder music because alcohol relaxes the inner ear muscles, resulting in less vibration being conveyed, resulting in sound dampening. So anyone drinking alcohol experiences lower sound volumes. This means that a comfortable volume for a drunk person is quite a bit higher than for a sober person. Which is a fact that can be quite unpleasant if you are the designated driver! I always try to remember to bring earplugs if I’m going to be a designated driver for a group going out drinking.
If you are drinking less than the average amount of alcohol at a social gathering, chances are your opinion of the music will be that it is too loud.
2. The intent of the social gathering in some cases is to facilitate good conversations. In such a case the person managing the music (host or DJ) should be thoughtful of this, and aim for a ‘coffee shop’ vibe with quiet background music and places to go in the venue where the music dwindles away.
In the alternate case, where the intent of the party is to facilitate social connection and/or flirtation and/or fun dancing… then the host / DJ may be actively pushing the music loud to discourage any but the most minimal conversation, trying to get people to drink alcohol and dance rather than talk, and at most have brief simple 1-1 conversations. A dance club is an example of a place deliberately aiming for this end of the spectrum.
So, in designing a social gathering, these factors are definitely something to keep in mind. What are the goals of the gathering? How much, if any, alcohol will the guests be drinking? If you have put someone in charge of controlling the music, are they on the same page about this? Or are they someone who is used to controlling music in a way appropriate to dance hall style scenarios and will default to that?
In regards to intellectual discussion focused gatherings, I do actually think that there can be a place for gatherings of people in which only a small subset of people talk… but I agree this shouldn’t be the default. The scenario where I think this makes sense is something more like a debate club or mini lecture with people taking turns to ask questions or challenge assumptions of the lecturer. This is less a social gathering and more an educational type experience, but can certainly be something on the borderlands between coffeeshop-style small group conversation and formal academic setting. Rousing debates and speeches or mini lectures around topics that the group finds interesting, relevant, and important can be both an educational experience and a fun social experience to perform or watch. I think this is something that needs more planning and structure to go well, and which people should be aware is intended and what rules the audience will be expected to follow in regards to interruptions, etc.
get people to drink alcohol and dance rather than talk
Also important to notice that restaurants and bars are not fully aligned with your goals. On one hand, if you feel good there, you are likely to come again, and thus generate more profit for them—this part is win/win. On the other hand, it is better for them if you spend less time talking (even if that’s what you like), and instead eat and drink more, and then leave, so that other paying customers can come—that part is win/lose.
(Could restaurants become better aligned if instead of food we paid them for time? I suspect this would result in other kind of frustrating actions, such as them taking too much time to bring the food in very small portions.)
So while it is true that the music serves a socially useful purpose, it also serves a profit-increasing purpose, so I suspect that the usual volume of music we are used to is much higher than would be socially optimal.
Could restaurants become better aligned if instead of food we paid them for time?
The “anti-café” concept is like this. I’ve never been to one myself, but I’ve seen descriptions on the Web of a few of them existing. They don’t provide anything like restaurant-style service that I’ve heard; instead, there are often cheap or free snacks along the lines of what a office break room might carry, along with other amenities, and you pay for the amount of time you spend there.
I think a restaurant where you paid for time, if the food was nothing special, would quickly turn into a coworking space. Maybe it would be more open-office and more amenable to creative, conversational, interpersonal work rather than laptop work. You probably want it to be a cafe—or at least look like a cafe from the outside in signage / branding; you may want architectural sound dampening like a denny’s booth. You could sell pre-packaged food and sodas—it isn’t what they’re here for. Or you could even sell or rent activities like coloring books, simple social tabletop games, small toys, lockpicking practice locks, tiny marshmallow candle smore sets, and so on.
Unfortunately different people have different levels of hearing ability, so you’re not setting the conversation size at the same level for all participants. If you set the volume too high, you may well be excluding some people from the space entirely.
I think that people mostly put music on in these settings as a way to avoid awkward silences and to create the impression that the room is more active than it is, whilst people are arriving. If this is true, then it serves no great purpose once people have arrived and are engaged in conversation.
Another important consideration is sound-damping. I’ve been in venues where there’s no music playing and the conversations are happening between 3 −5 people but everyone is shouting to be heard above the crowd, and it’s incredibly difficult for someone with hearing damage to participate at all. This is primarily a result of hard, echoey walls and very few soft furnishings.
I think there’s something to be said for having different areas with different noise levels, allowing people to choose what they’re comfortable with, and observing where they go.
It seems to me that this claim has a lot to overcome, given that the observers could walk away at any time.
does not facilitate close interactions that easily lead to getting to know people.
Is that a goal? I’ve never been much of a partygoer, but if I want to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody and get to know them, a party is about the last place I’d think about going. Too many annoying interruptions.
The function it plays is to stop the party-destroying phenomenon of big group conversations.
It may do that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the function. You could equally well guess that its function was to exclude people who don’t like loud music, since it also does that.
this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don’t like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).
One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards—the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can’t read people’s body language from across the room—and instead there needs to be an emotive radius from webcam / face-tracking needs to be larger than the sound radius. Or you can have a trad UI with “rooms” of very small size that you have to join to talk. tricky to get that kind of app right though since irl there’s a fluid boundary between in and out of a convo and a binary demarcation would be subtly unpleasant.
Another idea is to find alternative ways to sound isolate in meatspace. Other people have talked about architectural approaches like in Lighthaven. Or imagine a party where everyone had to wear earplugs. sound falls off with the square of distance and you can calculate out how many decibles you need to deafen everyone by to get the group sizes you want. Or a party with a rule that you have to plug your ears when you aren’t actively in a conversation. Or you could lay out some hula hoops with space between them and the rule is you can only talk within the hula hoop with other people in it, and you can’t listen in on someone else’s hula hoop convo. have to plug your ears as you walk around. Better get real comfortable with your friends! Maybe secretly you can move the hoops around to combine into bigger groups if you are really motivated. Or with way more effort, you could similarly do a bed fort building competition. These are very cheap experiments!
I just ran a party where everyone was required to wear earplugs. I think this did effectively cap the max size of groups at 5 people, past which people tend to split into mini conversations. People say the initial silence feels a bit odd though. I’m definitely going to try this more
I’m confident enough in this take to write it as a PSA: playing music at medium-size-or-larger gatherings is a Chesterton’s Fence situation.
It serves the very important function of reducing average conversation size: the louder the music, the more groups naturally split into smaller groups, as people on the far end develop a (usually unconscious) common knowledge that it’s too much effort to keep participating in the big one and they can start a new conversation without being unduly disruptive.
If you’ve ever been at a party with no music where people gravitate towards a single (or handful of) group of 8+ people, you’ve experienced the failure mode that this solves: usually these conversations are then actually conversations of 2-3 people with 5-6 observers, which is usually unpleasant for the observers and does not facilitate close interactions that easily lead to getting to know people.
By making it hard to have bigger conversations, the music naturally produces smaller ones; you can modulate the volume to have the desired effect on a typical discussion size. Quiet music (e.g. at many dinner parties) makes it hard to have conversations bigger than ~4-5, which is already a big improvement. Medium-volume music (think many bars) facilitates easy conversations of 2-3. The extreme end of this is dance clubs, where very loud music (not coincidentally!) makes it impossible to maintain conversations bigger than 2.
I suspect that high-decoupler hosts are just not in the habit of thinking “it’s a party, therefore I should put music on,” or even actively think “music makes it harder to talk and hear each other, and after all isn’t that the point of a party?” But it’s a very well-established cultural practice to play music at large gatherings, so, per Chesterton’s Fence, you need to understand what function it plays. The function it plays is to stop the party-destroying phenomenon of big group conversations.
As having gone to Lighthaven, does this still feel marginally worth it at Lighthaven where we mostly tried to make it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations? I can see the case for music here, but like, I do think music makes it harder to talk to people (especially on the louder end) and that does seem like a substantial cost to me.
Talking 1-1 with music is so difficult to me that I don’t enjoy a place if there’s music. I expect many people on/towards the spectrum could be similar.
Having been at two LH parties, one with music and one without, I definitely ended up in the “large conversation with 2 people talking and 5 people listening”-situation much more in the party without music.
That said, I did find it much easier to meet new people at the party without music, as this also makes it much easier to join conversations that sound interesting when you walk past (being able to actually overhear them).
This might be one of the reasons why people tend to progressively increase the volume of the music during parties. First give people a chance to meet interesting people and easily join conversations. Then increase the volume to facilitate smaller conversations.
Yeah, when there’s loud music it’s much easier for me to understand people I know than people I don’t because I’m already used to their speaking patterns, and can more easily infer what they said even when I don’t hear it perfectly. And also because any misunderstanding or difficulty that rises out of not hearing each other well is less awkward with someone I already know than someone I do.
As someone who’s spent meaningful amounts of time at LH during parties, absolutely yes. You successfully made it architecturally awkward to have large conversations, but that’s often cashed out as “there’s a giant conversation group in and totally blocking [the Entry Hallway Room of Aumann]/[the lawn between A&B]/[one or another firepit and its surrounding walkways]; that conversation group is suffering from the obvious described failure modes, but no one in it is sufficiently confident or agentic or charismatic to successfully break out into a subgroup/subconversation.
I’d recommend quiet music during parties? Or maybe even just a soundtrack of natural noises—birdsong and wind? rain and thunder? - to serve the purpose instead.
@habryka Forgot to comment on the changes you implemented for soundscape at LH during the mixer—possibly you may want to put a speaker in the Bayes window overlooking the courtyard firepit. People started congregating/pooling there (and notably not at the other firepit next to it!) because it was the locally-quietest location, and then the usual failure modes of an attempted 12-person conversation ensued.
Seems cheap to get the info value, especially for quieter music? Can be expensive to set up a multi-room sound system, but it’s probably most valuable in the room that is largest/most prone to large group formation, so maybe worth experimenting with a speaker playing some instrumental jazz or something. I do think the architecture does a fair bit of work already.
I’m being slightly off-topic here, but how does one “makes it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations”? More broadly, the topic of designing spaces where people can think better/do cooler stuff/etc. is fascinating, but I don’t know where to learn more than the very basics of it. Do you know good books, articles, etc. on these questions, by any chance?
I like Christopher Alexander’s stuff.
On the object level question, the way to encourage small conversations architecturally is to have lots of nooks that only fit 3-6 people.
“Nook”, a word which here includes both “circles of seats with no other easily movable seats nearby” and “easily accessible small rooms”.
Thanks! I knew of Alexander, but you reminded me that I’ve been procrastinating on tackling the 1,200+ pages of A Pattern Language for a few months, and I’ve now started reading it :-)
Was one giant cluster last two times I was there. In the outside area. Not sure why the physical space arrangement wasn’t working. I guess walking into a cubby feels risky/imposing, and leaving feels rude. I would have liked it to work.
I’m not sure how you could improve it. I was trying to think of something last time I was there. “Damn all these nice cubbies are empty.” I could not think of anything.
Just my experience.
I agree music has this effect, but I think the Fence is mostly because it also hugely influences the mood of the gathering, i.e. of the type and correlatedness of people’s emotional states.
(Music also has some costs, although I think most of these aren’t actually due to the music itself and can be avoided with proper acoustical treatment. E.g. people sometimes perceive music as too loud because the emitted volume is literally too high, but ime people often say this when the noise is actually overwhelming for other reasons, like echo (insofar as walls/floor/ceiling are near/hard/parallel), or bass traps/standing waves (such that the peak amplitude of the perceived wave is above the painfully loud limit, even though the average amplitude is fine; in the worst cases, this can result in barely being able to hear the music while simultaneously perceiving it as painfully loud!)
Other factors also to consider:
1.
Gatherings with generous alcohol drinking tend to have louder music because alcohol relaxes the inner ear muscles, resulting in less vibration being conveyed, resulting in sound dampening. So anyone drinking alcohol experiences lower sound volumes. This means that a comfortable volume for a drunk person is quite a bit higher than for a sober person. Which is a fact that can be quite unpleasant if you are the designated driver! I always try to remember to bring earplugs if I’m going to be a designated driver for a group going out drinking.
If you are drinking less than the average amount of alcohol at a social gathering, chances are your opinion of the music will be that it is too loud.
2. The intent of the social gathering in some cases is to facilitate good conversations. In such a case the person managing the music (host or DJ) should be thoughtful of this, and aim for a ‘coffee shop’ vibe with quiet background music and places to go in the venue where the music dwindles away.
In the alternate case, where the intent of the party is to facilitate social connection and/or flirtation and/or fun dancing… then the host / DJ may be actively pushing the music loud to discourage any but the most minimal conversation, trying to get people to drink alcohol and dance rather than talk, and at most have brief simple 1-1 conversations. A dance club is an example of a place deliberately aiming for this end of the spectrum.
So, in designing a social gathering, these factors are definitely something to keep in mind. What are the goals of the gathering? How much, if any, alcohol will the guests be drinking? If you have put someone in charge of controlling the music, are they on the same page about this? Or are they someone who is used to controlling music in a way appropriate to dance hall style scenarios and will default to that?
In regards to intellectual discussion focused gatherings, I do actually think that there can be a place for gatherings of people in which only a small subset of people talk… but I agree this shouldn’t be the default. The scenario where I think this makes sense is something more like a debate club or mini lecture with people taking turns to ask questions or challenge assumptions of the lecturer. This is less a social gathering and more an educational type experience, but can certainly be something on the borderlands between coffeeshop-style small group conversation and formal academic setting. Rousing debates and speeches or mini lectures around topics that the group finds interesting, relevant, and important can be both an educational experience and a fun social experience to perform or watch. I think this is something that needs more planning and structure to go well, and which people should be aware is intended and what rules the audience will be expected to follow in regards to interruptions, etc.
Wow, I had no idea about the effects of alcohol on hearing! It makes so much sense—I never drink and I hate how loud the music is in parties!
Also important to notice that restaurants and bars are not fully aligned with your goals. On one hand, if you feel good there, you are likely to come again, and thus generate more profit for them—this part is win/win. On the other hand, it is better for them if you spend less time talking (even if that’s what you like), and instead eat and drink more, and then leave, so that other paying customers can come—that part is win/lose.
(Could restaurants become better aligned if instead of food we paid them for time? I suspect this would result in other kind of frustrating actions, such as them taking too much time to bring the food in very small portions.)
So while it is true that the music serves a socially useful purpose, it also serves a profit-increasing purpose, so I suspect that the usual volume of music we are used to is much higher than would be socially optimal.
I also like Lorxus’s proposal of playing natural noises instead.
The “anti-café” concept is like this. I’ve never been to one myself, but I’ve seen descriptions on the Web of a few of them existing. They don’t provide anything like restaurant-style service that I’ve heard; instead, there are often cheap or free snacks along the lines of what a office break room might carry, along with other amenities, and you pay for the amount of time you spend there.
I think a restaurant where you paid for time, if the food was nothing special, would quickly turn into a coworking space. Maybe it would be more open-office and more amenable to creative, conversational, interpersonal work rather than laptop work. You probably want it to be a cafe—or at least look like a cafe from the outside in signage / branding; you may want architectural sound dampening like a denny’s booth. You could sell pre-packaged food and sodas—it isn’t what they’re here for. Or you could even sell or rent activities like coloring books, simple social tabletop games, small toys, lockpicking practice locks, tiny marshmallow candle smore sets, and so on.
Unfortunately different people have different levels of hearing ability, so you’re not setting the conversation size at the same level for all participants. If you set the volume too high, you may well be excluding some people from the space entirely.
I think that people mostly put music on in these settings as a way to avoid awkward silences and to create the impression that the room is more active than it is, whilst people are arriving. If this is true, then it serves no great purpose once people have arrived and are engaged in conversation.
Another important consideration is sound-damping. I’ve been in venues where there’s no music playing and the conversations are happening between 3 −5 people but everyone is shouting to be heard above the crowd, and it’s incredibly difficult for someone with hearing damage to participate at all. This is primarily a result of hard, echoey walls and very few soft furnishings.
I think there’s something to be said for having different areas with different noise levels, allowing people to choose what they’re comfortable with, and observing where they go.
It seems to me that this claim has a lot to overcome, given that the observers could walk away at any time.
Is that a goal? I’ve never been much of a partygoer, but if I want to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody and get to know them, a party is about the last place I’d think about going. Too many annoying interruptions.
It may do that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the function. You could equally well guess that its function was to exclude people who don’t like loud music, since it also does that.
this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don’t like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).
One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards—the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can’t read people’s body language from across the room—and instead there needs to be an emotive radius from webcam / face-tracking needs to be larger than the sound radius. Or you can have a trad UI with “rooms” of very small size that you have to join to talk. tricky to get that kind of app right though since irl there’s a fluid boundary between in and out of a convo and a binary demarcation would be subtly unpleasant.
Another idea is to find alternative ways to sound isolate in meatspace. Other people have talked about architectural approaches like in Lighthaven. Or imagine a party where everyone had to wear earplugs. sound falls off with the square of distance and you can calculate out how many decibles you need to deafen everyone by to get the group sizes you want. Or a party with a rule that you have to plug your ears when you aren’t actively in a conversation.
Or you could lay out some hula hoops with space between them and the rule is you can only talk within the hula hoop with other people in it, and you can’t listen in on someone else’s hula hoop convo. have to plug your ears as you walk around. Better get real comfortable with your friends! Maybe secretly you can move the hoops around to combine into bigger groups if you are really motivated. Or with way more effort, you could similarly do a bed fort building competition.
These are very cheap experiments!
I just ran a party where everyone was required to wear earplugs. I think this did effectively cap the max size of groups at 5 people, past which people tend to split into mini conversations. People say the initial silence feels a bit odd though. I’m definitely going to try this more