Serious research: The scientists randomly selected 40 males who ordered a glass of draft beer and monitored their consumption at different sound levels.

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CHICAGO: Blame the DJ: a new French study has found that loud bar music makes people drink more and drink faster.

"Previous research had shown that fast music can cause fast drinking, and that music versus no music can cause a person to spend more time in a bar," said Nicolas Gueguen, co-author and behavioural scientist at the University of Southern Brittany in Rennes.

"This is the first time that an experimental approach in a real context found the effects of loud music on alcohol consumption," he said.

Field research

Gueguen and his colleagues discretely visited two bars over the course of three Saturday nights whose owners agreed to let them manipulate the sound levels and test the results.

They randomly selected 40 males aged 18 to 25 who ordered a glass of draft beer and monitored their consumption at different sound levels.

The authors offered two hypotheses for why louder music would lead to increased drinking within a decreased amount of time.

"One: in agreement with previous research on music, food and drink, high sound levels may have caused higher arousal, which led the subjects to drink faster and to order more drinks," Gueguen said.

"Two: loud music may have had a negative effect on social interaction in the bar, so that patrons drank more because they talked less," he added.

The study will be published in the October edition of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.