Analytically minded MBAs said they were glad to help with her dissertation – what they dubbed her 'school paper'.

Schüll, a native New Yorker whose first encounter with Las Vegas was an accidental airport layover, spent several years in the city, haunting the offices of casino executives, the meeting rooms of Gamblers Anonymous (not surprisingly, Las Vegas has the most per capita attendees of any city in the US – some, Schüll says, wearing casino uniforms) and the gambling industry exhibitions where panel participants would say, offhand, things such as, 'Gambling, as I see it, is an irrational behaviour that is impulsive.' She freely admits that youth and looks helped her gain access to the inner sanctum of casino bosses, a world she says was not yet dominated by slick, corporate PR teams. 'From architecture to ambience to machine hardware and ergonomics, to the colours and buttons and then down into the game and the actual maths,' she says, 'all of it is in the service of maintaining the flow.' The sonic strategy is at one with an overall ethos that Schüll terms 'smoothing the ride', a holistic mantra running through the casino experience. To generate the sounds, the director sampled existing casino soundscapes, fusing the whole to, as he put it, 'add a new and better track to the traditional sound, but not to clash with it'. In her book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling In Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes that in the late 1990s the 'prescient audio director' at Silicon Gaming decided that every one of the sounds made by its slot machines – a number that now exceeds some 400 discrete noises – would be issued in what she terms 'the universally pleasant tone of C'.

It's as if Brian Eno had recorded Music For Casinos. It all percolates and pulsates in a gently propulsive fashion, as if to convey a sense of progress even as it relaxes. T he first thing you notice on entering the vast hall of the casino is the sound: an ambient wash of well-modulated tones, a 4,000-strong machine symphony set not to any discernible pattern, but not without harmony syncopated by deeper subwoofer exhalations, an occasional chirp and the simulated clang of coins.

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