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Halt, or I'll Play Vivaldi!
Mar. 14th, 2009 05:44 amLast night's Music and the Brain lecture at the Library of Congress had this wonderful, albeit somewhat misleading, title. Norman Middleton introduced the subject of classical music as crime stopper, but the main speaker was criminologist Jacqueline Helfgott of Seattle University. She provided some general background on crime prevention through environmental design and gave a number of examples of the application of music to this. Those were not strictly limited to classical music - a suburban Australian parking lot played Barry Manilow songs to stop teenagers from hanging out there and people on one block in Seattle used country music to drive teenagers to the next block. (She did point out that merely driving potential crime from one block to the next is not really crime prevention in any meaningful sense.)
The basic idea is that this works because music closely defines subcultures, so can make the environment more or less hostile to certain groups. But these are short term measures and there isn't clear evidence of how well they work in the long term. She also brought up the ethical issues associated with using music as an "ultrasonic pest repellant." The latter point is a good one, since I'd be just as annoyed as those teenagers if I had to listen to Barry Manilow for 3 hours a day. And I'd be hard pressed to find music that would be acceptable to all of my neighbors (who are fairly diverse in age and ethnicity) and would still deter gang members from hanging out in the area. My overall conclusion is that there are some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure how practical the application of them is, at least with respect to music. Some of the other ideas about crime prevention through design (e.g. architecture that encourages community involvement) seem like a better approach.
The basic idea is that this works because music closely defines subcultures, so can make the environment more or less hostile to certain groups. But these are short term measures and there isn't clear evidence of how well they work in the long term. She also brought up the ethical issues associated with using music as an "ultrasonic pest repellant." The latter point is a good one, since I'd be just as annoyed as those teenagers if I had to listen to Barry Manilow for 3 hours a day. And I'd be hard pressed to find music that would be acceptable to all of my neighbors (who are fairly diverse in age and ethnicity) and would still deter gang members from hanging out in the area. My overall conclusion is that there are some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure how practical the application of them is, at least with respect to music. Some of the other ideas about crime prevention through design (e.g. architecture that encourages community involvement) seem like a better approach.
