Last Tuesday night, at a quarter past eleven, with my husband asleep down the hall, I clicked on a link to a page about Log Cabin quilts. Before the first quilt came in, Pachelbel's Canon in D began to play through my computer's speakers, at whatever volume my nephew had left them after his last game of something with tanks in it. I know this piece. I have played its bass line at something over four hundred weddings. I did not need to hear it again at a quarter past eleven, on a sound card, while looking at quilts.

I have played the cello in orchestras around Kansas City for twenty-six years (a symphony, two community orchestras, a great many pit jobs and the aforementioned weddings), and I have taught young string players for thirty. That has given me opinions about music. This page is about only one of them: music should not start by itself.

People read your home page at work, with the boss two cubicles away. They read it at the library, where the computers sit ten feet from the reference desk. They read it late at night, with children and husbands asleep, and on a computer whose speakers were turned all the way up for something else. Music that starts on its own catches every one of those people by surprise, and the first thing they do is hunt for a way to stop it. On most pages there isn't one. So they click Back, and you've lost them before they read a word you wrote.

A webmaster in ResearchTriangle has written A Visitor's Bill of Rights, and Article II is "the right to silence": no music that plays by itself, and if you love the song, give it a link and tell people how big it is. I'd only add: and tell them who wrote it.

A MIDI file is not a recording. It's a list of instructions, rather like a player piano roll: play this note, this loud, for this long, on this instrument. Your visitor's sound card does the actual playing, and the sound card most people own plays every instrument like a music box with a head cold.

There is a standard list of instruments every sound card is supposed to know, and number 43 on it is the cello. I have heard number 43. It is not a cello. It is a kazoo that has had cellos described to it. My nephew tells me the better sound cards carry little recordings of real instruments inside them, and on his, I'll admit, the Canon sounded nearly respectable. Most of your visitors do not have my nephew's sound card. Most of them have the one that came in the box.

And so, all over the Web, Für Elise and The Entertainer and the Canon are playing themselves, tinny and too fast, on a hundred thousand home pages. Beethoven and Scott Joplin deserve better. So do you.

Someone sat down and put every note of that MIDI file in by hand. Someone decided how loud each note should be, and how long, and which instrument should play it, and fixed the wrong notes, and listened to it fifty times. That is hours of work, sometimes weeks. Then the file is copied from one page to the next to the next until nobody knows who made it, and the page says "Music: Canon" and nothing else. Not the sequencer's name. Not even Pachelbel's. Poor Johann.

Pachelbel wrote his Canon for three violins and basso continuo, which in practice means a keyboard and, nearly always, a cello. The three violins get to play the canon itself, each one chasing the one before it two bars behind, with something new and lovely every few bars.

The cello plays eight notes. Then it plays the same eight notes again. Then again. Twenty-eight times, start to finish. I counted, the first time, at a June wedding in 1974, and I have been counting ever since. The piece sat mostly unplayed for a very long time until a recording in the late 1960s made it famous, and the cello section has never quite forgiven that recording. A cellist hears the opening of the Canon the way a dentist's patient hears the drill.

I play it beautifully anyway. It's a wedding. But I'd rather not play it on your home page at a quarter past eleven, through a kazoo.

1. A link, never autoplay. Put the music on a link and let your visitors choose. The ones who want it will click. The ones at the office will thank you by staying.

2. Give the title and the composer. Not "pretty song." Not "background music #3." Write "Gymnopédie No. 1, by Erik Satie." If your visitor likes it, now they can find a real recording of it, which is the best thing that can happen to anybody's MIDI file.

3. Credit the sequencer, and ask first. A MIDI file is somebody's work even when the music is three hundred years old. Bach can't object, but the person who spent three weekends sequencing his inventions can. Find out who made the file, write to ask, and put their name next to the composer's. Most of them will say yes, and be pleased you asked.

4. Pop songs belong to someone. The song on the radio this week was written by living people and belongs to them and their publishers. A MIDI of it on your page is their song, however lovingly you found it. Leave it off.

5. Keep it short. A minute or two. Short pieces load faster and wear out their welcome slower, and no one has ever left a page wishing the music had gone on longer.

6. Choose pieces that survive a sound card. Some music can stand up to number 43 and some can't. My recommendations:

• Bach's Two-Part Inventions. Fifteen short keyboard pieces, each just two lines chasing each other. Two voices are about all a sound card can keep straight, and Bach built them so well they come through anything.
• Satie's three Gymnopédies. Slow, spare and quiet. There's so little going on that a sound card can't spoil much of it.
• Scott Joplin's rags. Written for the piano, and the piano is the instrument sound cards do least badly. The Maple Leaf Rag turned a hundred this year. Wish it a happy birthday, with a link.

Please leave off anything for strings, anything with a choir, and, I'm afraid, the Canon.

If you must, I've written out exactly how to do it politely, with the HTML, on If You Must.