Shedding further light on the relationship between music and drinking behavior, a study from French researchers has found that loud music played in bars appears to encourage patrons to drink more and faster, HealthDay News reported July 18.

Previous investigations of music's effect on drinking had found that people spend more time in bars that play music than in establishments that don't, and that fast music appears to result in fast drinking. For this study, Nicolas Gueguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud and colleagues looked at how male bar patrons' drinking behavior was affected by owners' random adjustments of music volume from normal to high and back.

In observing 40 male subjects between the ages of 18 and 25, the researchers found that music at higher volumes tended to encourage the men to drink more and faster. The researchers offered a couple of possible explanations: The louder sound might stimulate higher arousal levels, or the music simply might make verbal communication more difficult and thus encourage more time spent drinking.

"This is an informative and good study that I think a lot of people will identify with, because it makes a lot of sense," said Marc Galanter, M.D., director of the division of alcoholism and drug abuse at New York University's Langone Medical Center. "Because it seems that loud music throws people off their game and renders them less in control of their capacity to moderate their drinking."

The French research team suggested that consumers should be informed of the association between loud music and intensified drinking behavior, especially given that most of the automobile fatalities in France involve alcohol use. 

The research will be published in the October issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.