The critic Philip Hensher complained recently about the background music to an exhibition, saying that museums were far better silent. Libraries always were relatively so, and certainly most academic reference ones still are, but muzak has been creeping into public lending libraries lately, because the management has decided that silence is elitist and off-putting — despite numerous voices raised to the contrary.

When Tim Waterstone opened the first bookshops in what was to become a huge chain, he insisted background music was always played in them, bringing them down to the level of the supermarket or fashion store. My doctor's waiting room has a DVD player permanently on and it is rare to find a coffee shop in which loud music does not compete with the bang and hiss of the espresso machine. 

Children grow up to a racket from birth — and indeed, pre-birth, given that expectant mothers are now encouraged to place themselves and their unborn child close to music. It is not that all sound, or even all noise, is bad, so much as that silence is good and that in pushing it aside we are denying ourselves and our children a profound experience. 

If you go into a place of very great quiet and stay there for a while, you become aware first of all of the individuality, the identity perhaps, of any sound that penetrates it. When we put half a dozen items of food on to a fork and then into our mouths and chew them all up together, we miss the enjoyment of each distinctive flavour and texture. We probably cannot avoid going through much of our day in a confusion of sound but if we go into a place of silence and listen, we begin to understand the separate quality of everything we hear — the rustle of the wind through leaves, the song of one particular bird, the tap of a stick on the ground, the throatiness of a single cough, the hush and rasp of waves turning over on shingle, the lap of water against a jetty, the drip of a tap, a soft footstep on grass. If the silence is deep enough we may hear a watch tick. In a quiet library, the turning of a page, the scratch of pencil on paper, are separate, distinctive, sounds. They identify themselves to us, they have a personality. They are beautiful. It is not only natural sounds that gain a richness set in the context of silence — all sounds do. To deprive ourselves and our children of the ability to distinguish such aural detail is to diminish our sensory life.