I agree 100% with Dwight. Websites that play music or other sounds when you start them whether you want them to or not are crimes against nature, and my instant reaction is to kill whatever it is that’s making the noise; if that means closing the browser page, even before I’ve seen what I went there to see, then so be it. I avoid some sites altogether because of this sort of thing.
And let me add one more reason to avoid adding default sound to a webpage: I work in an open cubicle. If I click on a page that has sound, everyone around me knows about it. I’d just as soon not call attention to myself in that fashion, thankyouverymuch.
Yeah, I keep my computer on mute for that exact reason. I absolutely HATE sound when I don’t want it. In fact, when I worked in an office I didn’t even connect the speakers. When I wanted sound I plugged headphones into the jack on the front.
One new violator of the sound pollution rule are some blogs that link to uTube videos. For some reason when I launch some blog sites with embedded videos the videos just automatically load and start to play. Sometimes I open a half dozen or more tabs when reading a blog in bloglines and then when the sound starts I gotta go figure out which dang new link is creating it.
Bandwidth is another consideration. Anyone still stuck on dialup knows to avoid video clips, but you usually don’t know if a site is going to download and play audio until it’s too late and you’re stuck staring at a blank browser screen and watching the RD light on your modem go bananas.
MIDI files aren’t too bad: they offer high-quality music without a big bandwidth hit. But with nearly half of the U.S. still on dialup (particularly in poor and/or rural areas), sites shouldn’t just ASS-U-ME everyone has fiber-optic Internet access!