WS: Barenboim may have a point, but he barks at a wrong tree. Musical "mood enhancers" like Muzak are an equivalent of Prozac - basically a beneficial thing albeit mundane and uninspiring. Besides, Muzak-Prozac is easy to ignore.
A better conceived crusade against "musical noise" would target iPods, portable players, car stereos and boomboxes that emit extremely noxious sound that is physically harmful to human ear (more than 120 dB), highly annoying, and almost impossible to ignore by others. The acoustic properties of these listening devices make the sound audible to the environment, but in a highly distored form - either as a high-pitch crackling noise emitted by headsets, or a low pitch thumping noise emitted by car stereos and boom boxes. This is literally noise, not music. Being involuntarily exposed to it is like the second-hand smoke - it can make people sick of music or totally immune to it (cf. the learned-helplessness effect).
Wojtek
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