This being the exhibition season, a time for experiment in what are otherwise meaningless games, we would like to offer a small suggestion to the world of professional sports.

Try turning off the music.

At the very least, turn it down, way down, far enough down so that fans can be reminded of something special that has been all but lost to electronic decibels and mindless "entertainment."

The Sound of Sport.

Let us list but a few of the more precious ones: the sound a skate makes on the first turn on a fresh ice surface, the slap of an infielder's glove as a ball is tossed around, the whistle of a lacrosse ball, the screech of sneakers as a basketball turns over.

There is also a beauty in silence -- that edgy moment just before the puck drops, to mention but one -- that has been lost forever to pounding music, overused movie clips and, worst of all, shrill emcees who move about tormenting fans with contests no one but the participants has the slightest interest in.

Please do not misunderstand.

I will play my own obnoxious, private music as loud as I wish in my car and in my home -- I will even offer a pitiful Mick Jagger if completely alone -- but I, like so many others, cannot comprehend the reasoning behind filling every opening in a sporting event with a secondary "event" most of us would pay money to avoid.

It is, however, a losing battle.

One executive with a Western Conference hockey team says he sometimes finds himself standing in the press box screaming, "Turn that goddamn thing down or I'll fire your ass!" -- all to no avail.

His problem, of course, is that no one can hear him.

"I hear it," says Ken Dryden, president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who works out of the Air Canada Centre.

"I hear it a lot -- 'The arena is so loud.' "

He heard it first, and loudest, from his own father. Mr. Dryden invited him to an NHL game, only to look down from the press box at one point and see Murray Dryden sitting with hands over both ears.

The cacophony of sound began, sports historians say, in Chicago. First, baseball's Bill Veeck, owner of the White Sox, brought the world the exploding scoreboard and rock music, then the basketball Bulls got the notion that the arena itself was the main attraction.

Now the noise is everywhere -- called "game enhancement" in the National Football League -- and distinguishable only by its variations. In basketball and lacrosse, the noise pounds constantly; in hockey, mercifully, the scoreboard takes a break during play.

"There's an instinct there now," Mr. Dryden says. "The instant the whistle blows, the crowd's eyes go up to the video board."

Mr. Dryden realized how ingrained this trend had become during the final days of Maple Leaf Gardens. The Leafs had invited Jean Beliveau to come to Toronto for the Montreal Canadiens's final match at the Gardens, and he thought it appropriate that former Leaf captain Ted Kennedy also be invited along.

"I thought how neat it would be to find an old recording of that famous crowd call, "C'mon, Teeder!", but we couldn't find one so I figured, "Well, then, we'll just have someone in the stands replicate it.

"But then I realized that would never work -- no one would be able to hear it."

The endless noise, as much as the price of tickets, has also killed off one of sport's most endearing characters, the leather-lunged wit in the stands who, for all we know, is now at home yelling at his television.

While Mr. Dryden says the noise issue is largely a concern of older fans -- "If those 20 and under had their way, they'd probably want it louder" -- he does think that hockey, at least, has had the sense not to go the way of basketball with its wall-to-wall sound.

"People come in for three hours," Mr. Dryden says, "and the core of that three hours is the game. Do nothing to mess with it."

When venues attempt to control the emotion of the crowd by telling sophisticated fans when to clap and when to cheer, they make a grave mistake by not relating what's happening on the scoreboard to what might be happening on the ice or the floor.

The emotion, Mr. Dryden says, must be "honestly there.

"The point we get wrong the most is being ahead of the fans. You're ready for noise, they're ready for silence.

"You have to respect the mood of the game."

Perhaps, then, they could experiment once in a while with letting the crowd speak for itself.

They just might discover that fans are perfectly able to make their own music.