DAYS OF WINE AND MUZAK

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If music appears to express something," Igor Stravinsky once wrote, "this is an illusion and not a reality." Scientists at the Music Research Group at Britain's University of Leicester would beg to differ. They maintain that music conjures up images that can have a powerful, if subliminal, influence on our choice of products to buy and use.

To put their theory to the test, researchers took over the wine shelves in a local supermarket. They displayed four French and four German wines "matched for their price and dryness or sweetness," indicating the origin of each vintage with a French or German flag. For two weeks, from a tape deck on an upper shelf, they played their own homemade Muzak, alternating days of French accordion and German beer-hall music.

The results? "Despite an overall bias in favor of French over German wine sales," they soberly reported last week in the prestigious science journal Nature, "French wine outsold German wine when French music was being played, whereas German wine outsold French wine when German music was played." What may be even more significant is that only six of the 44 customers who consented to fill out a questionnaire admitted that they had been influenced by the music.

All this suggests, the report concludes, that "in-store music could influence product choice." That revelation, if taken to heart, might tip the balance of trade. If foreign emporiums could be induced to play Sousa marches or gangsta rap, who knows how much Coors or Budweiser the U.S. might sell abroad?

--By Leon Jaroff