TURN DOWN THE VOLUME

A relative of mine just returned from a wedding in another country.
When I asked her how the wedding was, she replied, "The music was too loud."
This morning, my husband's friend was describing a wedding that he had attended the night before. He complained to him that the music was so loud that he couldn't even speak to the person sitting next to him at his table.
At one point, the volume of wedding music was a topic that was being addressed with regulations starting to be introduced to lower the decibel level at wedding halls.
But, it seems that the problem is with us to stay.
Please be considerate when making a wedding. There are guests who have arrived from overseas who are absolutely exhausted and do not want to be subjected to the pounding rhythm that won't go away.
The nicest wedding I attended was when a relative told the band he wouldn't pay them if their music exceeded a certain decibel level. At one point, they were approaching the threshold, and I saw my relative dashing towards them with fire in his eyes. Needless to say, the musicians started to play more softly.

Speaking about noise, the following is an excerpt form an article in the New York Times entitled, For Some Parents, Shouting Is the New Spanking.
Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.
“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. “This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22yell.html?_r=1&hpw