Go-Go-Go Beat

Popeyes fried chicken franchises are pre-wired with zydeco and upbeat rock. In these joints you can hear a cheery-voiced singer singing, "You're paying now, but it's all right!"

For some companies, such as Old Navy, Muzak sets up each store's sound system -- Klipsch speakers, Bose amps, etc. The "energy flow," Sumter Cox says, "is supposed to be a smooth consistent experience." An automatic timer lowers the volume in the morning hours and cranks it up for the midday onslaughts.

At lunch hour, the Aeropostale shop in the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City is resonating. Very loudly. A chain of ultra-casual clothing stores, it is one of Muzak's customers. Patrons, mostly young women, flit in and out of the shop like sparrows. Through the speaker system, the British duo appropriately named Frou Frou sings a light, airy "Must Be Dreaming." Nearby there's disco music at Sephora. Hip-hop at Up Against the Wall. Rap music bursts out of a kiosk selling XM Satellite Radio subscriptions. More music rains down from overhead speakers in the corridors. Cacophony rules.

Starbucks, with a small shop in the food court, is hoping to provide more and more music for your personal soundtrack. The Seattle-based coffee company reported in late May that it had sold 21,000 copies of Antigone Rising's "From the Ground Up" in 12 days from 4,400 U.S. stores.

Some of the businesses not only have tunes playing overhead but specially packaged music for sale. Williams-Sonoma sells its own CDs -- in a wall bin near the cutlery -- including one to play while you're eating dinner. Victoria's Secret has a rack of "road trip" CDs on its checkout counter. The Godiva shop offers, no kidding, a $12.99 disc titled "Melt: Music to Eat Chocolate By."

An Island of Sound

There is far too much music in the world, the late composer Virgil Thomson wrote in London Magazine. "I do not feel this because I get tired of musical sound itself. Musical sounds are always a pleasure. It is unmusical sounds masquerading as musical ones that wear you down, and the commercializing of musical distribution has given us a great many of these as a cross to bear. It has also given such currency to our classics that even these the mind grows weary of. Because though musical sound is ever a delight, musical meaning, like any other meaning, grows stale from being repeated."

He wrote that in 1962. Imagine how he would feel today in the halls of the Pentagon City mall.

Milan Kundera, author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," writes that public music today has become "a flood of everything jumbled together" so that we don't know who composed it or when it begins or ends. It is "sewage-water music in which music is dying."

Neurologist Restak is sometimes overwhelmed. He rails against bookstores, for instance, that play loud, incongruous music. "They'll have something on there by the Doors," he says. "I can't look at a book in that situation."

As for shopping in the supermarket to Beach Boys music, Restak says, "To me it's dissonant. There is an emotional disconnect, a physical disconnect."

Music is fire. It can be warm and comforting. Or it can spread fast and move dangerously through the landscape. The musicholics have learned to fight fire with fire.

At the Georgetown Starbucks, as the silver-slippered woman listens to a CD while studying the brain, she is apparently oblivious to another layer of music in the caffeinated air -- the misty sounds of Antigone Rising.

At the Greenbelt Atlanta Bread Company, musicholic Roberto Cabrera listens to the technopoppish Rasmus on his iPod as he waits for his lunch. Overhead Muzak's classical music plays.

And when he goes to a mall and shops at Abercrombie & Fitch or Urban Outfitters, where music can be bursting through giant speakers, shaking the room and pressing on the chest as the stores and the corporations and the philosophies infiltrate his ears and seek out the tiniest, quietest corners of his life -- he likes to wear his iPod.

That way he gets to listen to the music he wants to, while walking at the pace he wants to, while choosing the polo shirts and jeans he wants to buy. And, he says, there is added value: Salespeople leave him alone.