Customers don't just experience how long they wait — they experience how long the wait feels, and that gap is where sound does its work. Research on telephone hold experience has repeatedly found that callers who hear music instead of silence during a hold estimate the wait as shorter and rate the service more positively, even when the actual hold time is identical.
Unfilled time drags
Consultant and Harvard Business School lecturer David Maister formalized this in his widely cited framework "The Psychology of Waiting Lines," whose first principle is that unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time. A wait with nothing to hold a customer's attention gets mentally rounded up; a wait filled with something — music, information, visible activity — gets rounded down, regardless of the number on the clock.
That single principle explains why silence is the worst default for any space where customers wait: a lobby, a reception desk, a phone queue, a fitting room line. Silence isn't neutral — it actively works against the venue by leaving the wait unoccupied.
Not any sound — the right sound
A controlled study on telephone hold experience found that mid-tempo, familiar-sounding music reduced callers' perceived wait time more effectively than either silence or unfamiliar, high-arousal tracks — and that music mismatched to the situation could backfire, making an already-tense wait feel longer, not shorter. The choice of soundtrack, not just its presence, is what moves the needle.
An observational study of hospital switchboard hold experience, published via PMC, found the same pattern in a live operational setting: what played during the hold — and not just whether something played — shaped how the wait was perceived and reported by callers.
From phone queues to physical spaces
The mechanism doesn't stop at the phone line. A hotel check-in queue, a spa reception area, a restaurant waiting on a table, a gym front desk at peak hours — all of these are the same "occupied vs. unoccupied time" problem in physical form. A curated, on-brand soundtrack does for a lobby what hold music does for a phone queue: it gives the brain something considered to attend to instead of dead air.
The difference between a venue that plans this deliberately and one that doesn't is rarely audible to the customer in the moment — but it's measurable afterwards, in how the wait gets remembered.
Across phone queues, waiting rooms and reception desks, the research points the same direction: the deciding factor in how a wait is remembered is rarely the clock. It's whether that time was filled with something considered and on-brand, or left as dead air.