You’re supposed to be quiet in the cinema. So why are the snacks so loud? Michael Rivera, London

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Readers reply

Cinema chains turn a huge profit selling noisy snacks like popcorn, nachos, and fizzy drinks. And a quiet cinema is usually an empty cinema. Sagarmatha1953

Most people seem to consider that cinemas are not, in fact, quiet places any more. Maybe that’s why the films are delivered at deafening volume? Wordchazer

Pretty easy, this one. You hear a slurped drink, you’re now thinking about drink … Mr_202

They aren’t noisy if you don’t stuff them in your face when the film is on. salamandertome

The noise itself is the point; what is on the screen is a mere diversion. Shifting from visual sensations to aural, there are no live recordings of classical or jazz music without audience members coughing intermittently. The best composers take this into account. As one example among many, Ligeti’s Requiem begins slowly in the lowest register in order to highlight the presence of audience-generated “music”. There is an uncomfortable wrestling between audience coughing and the composer’s notes. The music builds up slowly to eventually drown out the audience noise, keeping steady at an adequate level of loudness in order to assert the composer’s primacy in the dialectical orchestra-audience interaction. John Cage’s 4’ 33”, on the other hand, begins and ends by accepting the composer’s defeat and letting the audience music run its course. Not a second more or less. We can think of all the munching and crunching and slurping sounds in a cinema as unintentional Cage-like compositions. trp9871

I’m afraid there’s a self-styled elite who think they can do just as they please with their infernal crisp packets, nachos and sweet wrappers. The situation is untenable – something must be done. There must be order, not repressive order, but order. “Controlleurs” with uniforms and glaring eyes under bushy eyebrows, with signs at entrances: ADMISSION IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN TO ALL CINEMAS AT ALL TIMES FOR ALL MEMBERS OF THE RUSTLE GROUP. bricklayersoption

To answer the question with a question: why do people feel compelled to eat overpriced food in the cinema? Surely you go to watch the film? Eat beforehand or afterwards. It brings back memories of the old cinema ads for, usually, the Indian restaurant a few hundred yards from the cinema. br1ckh1ll

I think the overpricing is the point, from the cinemas’ perspective. EBGB

The markup must be huge on popcorn. salamandertome

I read somewhere that popcorn was a cheap postwar snack used by the cinemas to make extra money. Granted, now you need to get a second mortgage if you want to buy snacks at the cinema. Blackmoustache

The snacks are no louder than they would be elsewhere. Cinemas are acoustically designed to allow the audience to become immersed in the experience, which means they’re heavily insulated from external noise sources and therefore relatively quiet on the inside. This means a food wrapper rustling or someone eating food is much more obvious. There’s a related factor coming into play, too: if you think about a typical cinema, there’s often a direct line of sight between you and someone else. Any noise they make will propagate spherically and may reach your ears before it can be muffled by the acoustic insulation. Dorkalicious

Silent films are rare these days, and the movies have long been the crunchies. EddieChorepost

I never buy the highly processed junk they sell at cinemas, and I don’t eat all through the film. When I went to see Hamnet, I waited for about an hour to work up my appetite before fetching out my raw celery and carrots. alexito

I suppose that the main criterion for cinema snacks is that they have to be dry, because you’re eating them with your fingers in the dark. Dry food is, pretty much inevitably, crunchy food. SpoilheapSurfer

I Googled this exact question the other day when the man three seats down from me at the cinema spent the entire movie eating two buckets of popcorn more loudly than I have ever heard anyone eat before. To be clear, I’m not shaming him for eating two buckets of popcorn, I just couldn’t believe how loud it was despite the distance between us. He seemed to be enjoying the movie and I didn’t want to ruin his experience, so I just stuck a finger in my ear for 90 minutes. livcommentspoorly

To drown out the sound of the person two seats away, talking on their phone while the film is on? XerxesCork

I normally eat healthy and don’t disturb in quiet places, and to me eating popcorn has the same appeal as eating polystyrene. This said, last week I went to the cinema with friends at the end of a busy day and didn’t manage to have a real meal beforehand, so I bought some popcorn. I ate them very slowly throughout the movie to avoid making too much noise, letting each one of them melt in my mouth before swallowing. I cannot say this improved my popcorn appreciation (and the movie was also not great). Plastictrees

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