He has rhymed better verses, but the truth of this one is undisputed.
"Music is often not found beautiful because it is always associated with noise," says Wilhelm Busch's picture poem "The Mole" (1874).
Sometimes it's pure joy when coincidence drives music into our ears where we don't expect it.
A very good musician playing in the pedestrian street is such a delight.
Or a detour via Willy-Brandt-Platz, where the Frankfurt Opera program is broadcast on performance days.
This reliably gets people to slow down in the middle of a run or even stop - the strangers are delighted by Mozart or Humperdinck, who so unexpectedly take up space, the locals in the curious recognition of the sound effect.
Those are the good moments.
Noise pollution in buses and trains
Everyone knows the bad ones.
Shops and pubs that keep their customers from consuming with sound waves and presumably aim the opposite.
Construction sites in front of the house, because no craftsman would be able to do without a Bluetooth box, which reliably drowns out every impact drill.
And nobody who is dependent on public transport can save themselves from the music enjoyment of others.
Be it because many contemporaries no longer know what headphones are and prefer to let their wider surroundings share in German rap, international folk music and rock.
Or because the sound system is turned up so loud that even the best headphones don't keep in the listener's head what should only be intended for him.
What spills out of them is always the same hammering in the same four-four time.
Nothing is as boring and as annoying as a pop song from stranger's devices at the same time.
The songs may even still have quality in their entirety - broken down into bass and drums, that is, what rumbles through S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains, buses and ICEs becomes the most obtrusive of uninvited music that one can experience in everyday life.
A sound.
And an expression of indifference, if not outright contempt for all fellow travelers that lies deeper than the deepest boom bass.