Horror vacui como principio interpretativo del fenómeno contemporáneo de saturación con música de fondo

We are experiencing a generalization of music in all contexts, including the commercial, social and labor, to the point that sound has invaded the public space. Music has a great communication capacity and effectiveness in generating emotions and attitudes. Thus, music has been used as a persuasion tool in advertising and as a formula to produce positive responses in individuals. However, its excessive presence suggests there is a current tendency or need to fill the entire space with sounds, with no space for silence. In this work, we present this phenomenon as a manifestation in modern societies of the "horror vacui", a Latin expression that means "fear of empty space", whose origin is in the philosophical paradigm that denied the emptiness in nature and was later applied in art history to describe ornate works, without gaps, like those of the Baroque. We propose this parallelism as a research method in musical communication.