Julian Treasure is a top-rated international speaker. His five TED talks, on various aspects of sound and communication, collectively have over 160 million views. He has been featured in TIME Magazine, The Economist, The Times, and on many international TV and radio stations and podcasts.
What’s the big idea?
Sound Affects is a plea to listen in a world that is forgetting how to. It explores the power and wonders of sound, the extraordinary sense of hearing, and the disappearing skill of listening, which underpins all our relationships from family and work to society. Julian offers advice on how to become more conscious listeners and, in turn, enhance relationships, health, productivity, and happiness.
Below, Julian shares five key insights from his new book, Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet. Listen to the audio version—read by Julian himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Sound affects you in four powerful ways.
Sudden sounds are physically affecting you all the time. Sound changes your heart rate, breathing, hormone secretions, and even your brainwaves. If you suddenly hear alarm bells, that’s a shot of cortisol, your fight-or-flight hormone. What if you hear the hum of waves at the beach? Gentle surf is a wonderful sound to use if you have problems sleeping. We associate it with rest and relaxation.
The second way sound affects you is psychologically. Music can change our feelings dramatically, but it’s not the only sound that can do that. In my work doing audio branding, I’ve deployed birdsong to make people feel secure. We’ve learned over hundreds of thousands of years that when the birds are singing, things are normally safe. It’s also nature’s alarm clock, so it’s a great sound to work to.
‘The third way sound impacts you is cognitively, meaning how well you can think. You can’t understand two people talking at the same time. We have a bandwidth for about 1.6 human conversations, so people really struggle when they work in offices where many people are speaking simultaneously, especially if you can hear someone talking right behind you. Productivity can drop by two-thirds in that kind of environment.
The fourth way sound affects you is behaviorally. It changes what you do, right up to what you choose to buy. In one study, two identical visual displays of wine were placed side-by-side in a supermarket—one of French wine, the other of German wine. They alternated playing French music one day and German music the next, doing so for many weeks. On the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by five bottles to one. On the German music days, German wine outsold French wine by two bottles to one. That’s a huge shift in behavior, and it was unconscious: almost nobody had noticed the music.
If that’s how powerfully sound changes behavior below the level of consciousness, I think it pays us to become more conscious about it.
2. Hearing is a capability, but listening is a skill.
You hear everything around you to the best of your ability. One in four people on the planet has damaged hearing because of the noise around us. Whatever you can hear, you then listen, and listening is a process of selecting certain things to pay attention to and interpreting them. My definition of listening is making meaning from sound. It’s a skill that you can master, practice, and become an expert at—very different from hearing, which is a capability.
“People who master listening have a huge advantage in life.”
Listening is essential for learning, leading, selling, and relating to other people. People who master listening have a huge advantage in life because, as Hemingway said, most people don’t listen.
3. Your listening is unique.
We all listen through a set of filters. Those filters start with the culture we are born into, the language we learn to speak, and then the values, attitudes, and beliefs we develop over time. We learn them from parents, friends, role models, and whoever is in our lives. Every individual’s filters combine in a way that is unique to them.
In any given situation, we may have intentions, expectations, and assumptions about what’s going on, particularly in other people’s heads. We may also have emotions going on. Listening and strong emotion are inversely related. If you want to calm somebody down who is upset, the best way is to listen to them. But equally, the more upset or even happy you get, the more your listening is degraded because you’ve got so much going on inside.
Each person’s filters are different, creating a listening position which we tend to occupy habitually. It’s a little bit like a bunker we create, and we listen through a slit in the front created by those filters. It’s a wonderful thing to become conscious of those filters and understand that you can change them.
4. Nature sound is good for you.
Nature sounds are beneficial. Wind, water, and birds composed the soundtrack to our evolution. Homo sapiens have been around for around 300,000 years, and those sounds have been around for three million years prior to our species’ emergence. Those are some of the natural sounds that we are designed to live in.
“Wind, water, and birds composed the soundtrack to our evolution.”
Sadly, 50 percent of humanity now lives in cities and rarely is immersed in those sounds. Even if you can’t get them naturally around you, it’s a good idea to broadcast them artificially for yourself. Beautiful birdsong, gentle water, calm wind, and other sounds of nature connect you with the world that you were designed to live in. They reduce stress and create happy hormones in your body. They’ll make you more relaxed and more productive.
5. Silence is a sound.
Silence is a very important sound. Like nature sounds, we’ve rather lost contact with it in our noisy city environments. Many people who go to the country feel uncomfortable with the silence. If that’s you, try to challenge that because it’s very important to have a good relationship with silence. It’s your baseline. It’s the sound that makes all other sounds make sense. Without silence, everything becomes cacophony.
There are different qualities of silence. It’s not a universal sound. The silence of a high mountain above the tree line on a windless day is very different from the silence of a deep cave, which can be cloaking and almost overpowering. It can be a powerful sound in conversation or when giving a presentation pause.
If you’ve lost contact with silence, rediscover it. Give yourself a couple of minutes of silence a few times a day. You might have to go into a broom cupboard or a bathroom to get it. It’s important to reestablish your connection with that baseline. Refresh your ears because it will help you to listen afresh. There’s a reason that silence is at the heart of every spiritual tradition: in silence, you encounter yourself and your connection with whatever is important to you. Rediscover silence and you will discover many benefits.
Forge a more conscious relationship with sound by taking responsibility for the sound you create and consume. Sound Affects is all about enhancing our consciousness by opening a doorway into this wonderful dimension of sound that most people sadly have lost contact with. The benefits of going through that door are legion.
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