Should we pipe music into the tube?

 Should we pipe music into the tube?

Wrong tracks ... Should Berlioz and Bach accompany our dailycommute? Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty

Anyone commuting on London's Victoria line faces a twice-dailymusical lottery: which masterpiece from the canons of classicalmusic will accompany your descent into the overheated tumult of thetube at rush-hour, and what dulcet strains will dramatise yourescape from the tunnels of public transport at the end of the day?

It makes for some weird juxtapositions: one day, I renewed myOyster card to the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No 27and re-emerged among the crowds to Rimsky Korsakov's Sheherazade.You can see the whole of the 40-hour Metronet playlist in a linkfrom Neil Fisher's Times article about it earlier this year , in which I was coincidentally quoted.

You aren't meant to listen to this music: you're meant to be relaxed by it, ideally not commit crime to it . That's the idea, at any rate, and anecdotally it seems to work,not least because people don't want to hang around a place whereclassical music is playing. It's the same kind of socialengineering that makes Top Shop play dance music at high-volume andhigh-speed to make you buy faster, quicker, and more; or that lullsyou supposedly into an oasis of calm, as Vivaldi's Four Seasons chimes down the phone as you wait to speak to an airline, bank, or credit card company -something that tends to have the opposite effect.