Have you ever stood quietly in a stall at the driving range and listened?

There is thrashing, grunting and foot stomping. Scattered between the thumps and thwacks will be soft, beseeching whispers. Someone will, of course, be talking business on the cellphone. Someone else will be asking for advice, or giving it. Someone will be shouting the most tortured lamentations and swearing off golf forever.

And what of laughter? Do you hear laughter?

Sure, there is some, especially mocking snickers of disgust. But real laughs, the sounds of people at play, are usually reserved for the less serious along the lineup. Beginning golfers laugh, people on a date at the range laugh, and so do groups of friends goofing around.

What does that say about the rest of us?

We need some laughs. I know golfers go to the range to get better, and that takes concentration and focus. But what if the act of going to the range were a game in itself? What if the whole point were to go there to play?

At Top Golf, a new kind of driving range, that is entirely the point, and the golf industry could learn a lesson from its success. In turn, that success might do a favor for golf at large.

A visit to Top Golf does not involve buying a token and hoping there is a dry stall available. With the advent of ingenious microtechnology, Top Golf makes golf practice a competitive activity. Players aim at dartboardlike targets spaced at multiple distances — they could be 50 yards, 100 yards or 200 yards — and sensors read a microchip embedded in each driving-range ball. Points are awarded depending on how close the balls come to the targets. Scores are displayed on large touch-screen monitors in each oversize driving bay, the better to share with your teammates and opponents.

Up to six people can play at once, and there are sofas and other seats nearby to relax on while not hitting. At the newest Top Golf locations — there are four in the United States , with plans for many more — you can direct everything from the touch-screen monitor. That means you can choose from one of several games to play, order more balls from the automatic dispensing system or summon nachos and beer from one of three bars and restaurants.

Waiters and waitresses called caddies fetch the food and drink for you.

You can still get serious practice in, quietly muttering to yourself as you have for years, but the bigger target audience is people looking for an afternoon or evening of entertainment. It’s a cross between the ambience of a 1950s bowling alley and an episode of “ The Jetsons .”

Tell me that doesn’t make you laugh.

“What I like best is that it fights golf’s staid, overly traditional stereotype,” said Steve di Costanzo, the president of Golf Range magazine. “Everybody is welcome and everybody can relate to it on their level, whatever that is.”

Joe Vrankin, the chief executive of the parent company that oversees the Top Golf locations in the United States and three more in Britain , said 45 percent of Top Golf’s customers would be classified as nongolfers, which is to say they had never played on a traditional course or usually play fewer than two rounds a year.

“It’s a lot of people who are busy during the day, and they come at night rather than going to dinner and a movie,” Vrankin said. “They bring a girlfriend, a wife, their buddies or their families, and they stay for a few hours. It’s a new sector called golf entertainment.”

It is a rare golf setting, because in this case, there is no intimidation factor, with no fashion protocols, no complicated rules and no worries about slowing up the serious golfers playing behind you. Because it’s possible to track every visitor through the credit cards used to pay for the games and services, Vrankin said, the company’s data reveals that a vast majority of Top Golf customers, up to 90 percent, come back for a second visit.

He also said the facilities averaged 200,000 visitors a year, with each visitor typically spending $35. There are Top Golfs in Alexandria , Va., near Washington , with another just outside Chicago , one in Dallas and another in Allen, Tex., a Dallas suburb.

The locations offer leagues and instruction programs; have pro shops that sell traditional golf equipment; and are partners with local golf courses. The Chicago location is next to an executive-length golf course.

“We introduce a lot of people to golf because they come to us and see that they can hit the ball and they realize it’s not that hard,” Vrankin said. “That makes them curious and comfortable about playing on a traditional course.”

Top Golf, which has the golf manufacturer Callaway as an investor, also caters to bachelor parties, birthday parties and similar gatherings. A wide audience is being exposed to the game. At the Dallas-area locations, a two-hour wait is not uncommon.

If you’re wondering why there isn’t a Top Golf in your neighborhood, consider that you need a decent-size parcel of land and that the technology is costly. It costs about $10 million to open a facility. Nonetheless, Vrankin says he expects to find the financing to open six more Top Golfs in 2013 and plans to open another 10 in 2014.

The Southeastern United States and Texas may see most of that initial growth, although Vrankin said the company would like to get into the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia markets. He said he would like to have 50 Top Golfs open in the next six years.

There are about 1,800 golf driving ranges in the United States, and in the last 20 years, most have moved beyond the mom-and-pop operations they once were.

“It’s not a tin-cup industry anymore,” di Costanzo said. “You can go to just about every metropolitan area and find a state-of-the-art, full-service practice and golf learning center.”

I drive by dozens of driving ranges every year, all over the country, and they always seem to be buzzing with activity. If I am lured off the road — hey, there’s always time for a quick bucket — it’s not unusual for someone to be waiting for my space by the time I’m done. If golf rounds are in decline because we don’t have five hours to play any longer, there still seem to be plenty of people who want to keep swinging their clubs.

The Top Golf complexes would appear to be another example of the kind of innovative ways the game must pursue to keep casual golfers in the fold and to entice new and younger golfers. Not everybody has $10 million to throw around, but including entertainment elements in multiuse golf facilities would probably attract more groups of golfers and families of golfers.

I learned golf at a little pitch-and-putt nine-holer while my brother wildly swatted away on the adjacent range and my mother and father played minigolf. Sometimes I think the golf was just an excuse for the ice cream served there afterward, but it was golf nonetheless.

And in that way, maybe the best thing about the Top Golf concept is its inclusive nature. It’s not one person per stall. It’s everybody’s stall. The more, the merrier.

That might even make you laugh.