In this episode, Neil and Jason talk to Julian Treasure, the author and presenter of several of the most viewed TED Talks of all time, including ‘How to Speak So People Want to Listen’ which has been viewed more than 150 million times. A self-proclaimed ‘listening evangelist’, Julian shares remarkable insights into the ways in which conscious listening brings about positive change both in personal and professional relationships, how low-cost acoustic considerations for classrooms deliver remarkable educational improvements and how sound in space created life, the universe and everything.
Announcer Rosie:
You’re listening to the Apple and Biscuit Show with Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman.
Neil Hillman:
Hello and welcome to the Apple and Biscuit Show. I’m Dr. Neil Hillman.
Jason Nicholas:
And I’m Jason Nicholas. We’re two professionals working in film and television sound who enjoy discussing the many ways that sound is used in moving picture production to engage, entertain, educate, and inform audiences. Our podcasts cover a range of topics through interviews with industry insiders as well as academics and professionals in other fields who talk about the human understanding and perception of sound.
Neil Hillman:
We’re a bit out of the ordinary with our backgrounds too. Whilst we’re both long -standing and current practitioners carrying out location sound recording, dialogue editing, and being re -recording mixes, we also have a strong academic link to the topic of moving picture sound…
Jason with an interest in human psychology and me with a research background in sound design and its effects on human emotions. So hopefully the content of our podcast and the guests who join us will prove enlightening to anyone with an interest in the part that sound plays not just in filmmaking but in life itself.
So, wherever you join us from and whatever your interest is in the topic of sound You’re welcome along.
Neil Hillman:
Our guest today is Julian treasure one of the most popular Ted talk speakers of all time with five presentations having more than a hundred and fifty million viewers or perhaps I should say that he has a hundred and fifty million listeners His talk how to speak so people want to listen is number six in the list of all -time most popular Ted talks; and his other Ted talk presentations ‘five ways to listen better’, ‘why architects need to use their ears’, ‘the four ways that sound affects us’ and ‘sound health in eight steps’ all appear on the TED Talks favourites list, too.
Twenty years ago, Julian founded the Sound Agency, at the time a groundbreaking audio branding company that asked and answered the question “How does your brand sound?” The company also developed strategies to enhance well -being and productivity in workspaces.
He’s written two books, ‘Sound Business’ and ‘How To Be Heard’, with a third book with a working title, ‘Everything Is Sound’ due for publication later this year.
Julian, welcome to the show. Are you well? And where in the world do we find you?
Julian Treasure:
Thank you, Neil. Pleasure to be here. And you find me at my home and studio, which is in Orkney. That’s an Pelago off the north coast of Scotland and a very wonderful place to live.
Neil Hillman:
Now it’s fitting that your latest book is called Everything is Sound. As I remember attending one of your fabulous seminars and you started with the bang, the big bang in fact, and you said something that for me as a sound professional, really gladdened my heart. Because as most people know, in sound for moving pictures, we tend to play second fiddle to the pictures department.
But you said that the universe began, in fact, all life began, thanks to sound. Would you share that thought with our listeners?
Julian Treasure:
Yes, I have to tell you there’s a change to the title of my book actually, in conversations with the publishers. We’ve all decided that it’s now going to be called ‘sound effects’ with an ‘a’, because really the focus of the book is the relationship between human beings and sound, how we affect sound and how sound affects us. So that’s what it’s going to be called. It’s coming out spring 25 in the UK and the US. And actually, a chapter of the book is entitled Cosmophony, which is quite an intriguing area to be in.
Most people think space is silent, but it isn’t, in fact, because very, very, very low frequency sound has no trouble at all finding a mean free path through the universe. Even intergalactic space is not a vacuum.
It’s a very, very dilute plasma. So there are particles, they’re just a long way apart. But if you happen to be a sound wave with a wavelength of light years, then that’s no problem. So the universe is full of sound, it’s just far too low frequency for us to perceive if you had ears the size of a galaxy, perhaps you might be able to. And yes, in that chapter, I interview a couple of professors and experts and we revisit that thing I talked about in that seminar, which is In the very first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was an expanding cloud of superheated plasma.
You couldn’t see anything. It was just a bright, glaring cloud. It was like a very bright fog. So light really wasn’t being able to do anything at all. But within that fog, there were sound waves. And this has been well -established now. And in fact, we can see the makeup of those sound waves in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is redshifted down from light to radio waves, and we can, you know, that defines the edge of how far we can see, anyway, 13 point, what is it, 8 billion light years away. Our perception of the universe is a sphere with that radius.
Well, we don’t know what’s beyond that. The universe is not a sphere probably, maybe, who knows, might be an elephant, the old turtle story, I don’t know, but the sound waves that existed in that plasma are primal and caused the existence of matter and us because they created fluctuations in the density of the matter and gravity did the rest, as denser elements, denser areas, started to coalesce under the power of gravity, and they eventually of course formed stars, galaxies, and us.
So yeah, sound created everything.
Neil Hillman:
Well talking of the Big Bang reminds me of the old and terrible film industry joke. Why does thunder always follow the lightning? And the answer is, it’s because even God has to wait for sound.
Sorry about that. So we started with a pretty huge topic. And here’s a huge topic of thought too. I also remember hearing you say that politicians are always having talks, but we never actually hear about them having listening. How do you think the world would be different, especially at the moment, if the emphasis at political summits was on listening rather than talking?
Julian Treasure:
Yeah, Well, in fact, my purpose in life has moved quite dramatically. You mentioned the sound agency, which actually I’ve now closed. I’ve folded it into my own business.
I still consult on business sound, but going around shopping malls and doing audits of them is no longer what I really want to do with my life. So I now focus through my company, Julian Treasure Limited, on particularly listening. Because I think never has the world needed listening more than it does now. It’s massively under threat from all sorts of angles.
And we can talk about why people don’t listen in a moment. But the effects of not listening, we see around us all around the world, polarization in politics.
We see conflict. And we see, you know, from a micro level to a macro level. I mean, I’m, you know, from family conflict and, and business conflict and mistakes and errors and, you know, people shouting at each other right up to war. Most of these things have their root, a lack of listening, which is all about being right and making other people wrong.
And unfortunately, the internet has accelerated that process. So, you know, there are lots and lots of people going out onto the internet to seek affirmation or to seek confirmation that their opinion is correct.
There you are. I knew I was right. Thousands of people agree with me. Yeah, but there are millions who don’t, but you’re not asking them. So, in that process of a very self -righteous reinforcement of extreme views, we are developing more and more extreme politics. You see that in the UK, the US, I mean every country across Europe. Social conflict, people not tolerating each other.
Now to me, listening is the sound of democracy because how can we have democracy if we don’t listen to people with whom we disagree and tolerate them?
You can’t live next door to somebody you fundamentally you fundamentally disagree with, if you are lost in this world of making them wrong, hating them, demonizing them, caricaturing them, and so forth, you get the terrible events that happened in Rwanda, if that goes on, that kind of demonization of people. So I think it’s really, really important that we take back control, hold relationship with listening. Most people don’t even know listening is a skill.
It’s widely confused with hearing and they are completely different things. So that’s become my passion. I travel the world giving keynotes about listening to organizations and associations.
The new book is really a peon to listening. It’s a plea to listen because sound magnificent, amazing. You know, I’ve got chapters on biophony, geophony, cosmophony and of course anthropophony.
So that’s the sounds of animals, our planet, the universe and human beings. And also, there’s a lot of stuff about sound itself. And it finishes with a chapter on silence, which of course is something that, again, we need to re -establish a relationship with very importantly.
Jason Nicholas:
So, with that in mind, I mean, just at a basic level, what’s happening when two people or two groups have a conversation? What’s going on between the two people? And maybe reflect on how that happens in a healthy way and how that happens in an unhealthy way sometimes.
Julian Treasure:
Well, I think that there are two imbalances in the world at the moment. There’s the hegemony, if you like, of writing. And writing was only invented 5 ,000 years ago.
And for many hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, even we, homo sapiens and our ancestors, have been using sound to communicate to each other.
So, you know, almost entire of human history, speaking and listening, have been the main way. We’ve communicated, taught each other and worked in groups. And now writing seems to have edged the side, speaking and listening to the point where a lot of young people prefer texting to seeing some. I mean, I can understand that if you’re asking somebody out, it’s a bit less threatening, isn’t it, to send a text and get a rejection than it is to do it face to face.
But nevertheless, we’re seeing, you know, with the rise of email originally, then text instant messaging and so forth, using our fingers and our eyes to communicate has become the norm and we’ve lost something in the process there.
So that’s part of the imbalance that’s going on is the dominance of text -based communication. The other part is the dominance of sending over receiving.
My TED Talk on speaking has been seen by at least five times as many people as my Ted took on listening. And there was a big piece of research on organizational listening done a few years ago, where they found that the summary is they found organizational listening is abject, terrible, almost non -existent. And the proportion they found there was that on average, most organizations were spending at least four times as much resource, time, effort, energy, money, on sending as they were on receiving.
Which I suppose is not a big surprise when you say corporate communication, you do it, you immediately think of PR, advertising, social media, it’s outbound, it’s all outbound. So little listening gets really squashed by this.
First of all, text and secondly, sending. We’re all much keener to be heard than we are to listen. And that doesn’t work very well as an equation. I mean, what’s the point in speaking really well if nobody’s listening? What’s the point in free speech if nobody’s listening? So, you know, I’ve become increasingly passionate about listening and it’s become my whole focus really is to evangelize listening, to promote listening to have people rediscover this incredibly important skill, which when you think about it, we don’t teach in school. I mean, how mad is that?
If we taught children first how to listen well, how much more of their education would they appreciate over the years that they go through that system? But we don’t.
Education, how good is the curriculum, how good are the teachers, and almost no time on receiving it. So that’s a kind of long -winded answer to your question, Jason. When people get together, they’re much keener to send than they are to receive. There’s a lot of what I call speech writing going on in conversations, you know, where this noise is going on in front of me, that’s you talking, and I’m composing my next brilliant bit of monologue. So, you know, that process is kind of writ large in the world. People are far more keen to put stuff out there, to be heard. I mean, part of it’s ego driven. The ego, of course, wants affirmation. It wants approbation. It wants to be gloried and appreciated.
So, a lot of that is about sending. And people don’t realize the importance of listening, which is a form of meditation to me. I mean, if you’re truly listening to somebody or not preparing your next bit of monologue, you’re quiet, still in a place where you’re doing nothing. It’s very similar to meditation and just receiving the other person and trusting that your mouth will know what to do at the end. So it’s a different practice to what a lot of people do in conversation that’s for sure.
Jason Nicholas:
It’s interesting you mentioned about the difference between text and speech because we’re both dialogue editors and I think everybody recognizes you have a script but that’s brought to life by the actor.
You have the actor’s voice, their timbre, their prosody, their whole method of being and bringing that out in voice and there’s so much of a difference in that text and the human voice and so much is lost in just the text -based communication.
Julian Treasure:
And misunderstanding as well. I mean, how many times have we sent an email that’s been completely misconstrued by somebody at the other end because they couldn’t hear the little irony or the tone of voice that we would have used had we said it?
Would you rather hear a play or read a play? Well, I know which one I’d you know, the richness of human interaction is so in our voice. You know, we’ve been doing this for millions of years. And it is not an accident that it’s an incredibly amazing instrument that we all use the human voice.
I mean, that is the other side of the coin. And, you know, going back to your question, Jason, about interaction between people, the whole essence of my work It’s a model where instead of what most people think goes on, which is a straight line, “I speak, you listen.” No. That’s not how it happens. Speaking and listening are in a circular relationship because the way I speak affects the way you listen, the way you listen affects the way I speak, and this all happens within a context which you guys will be very familiar with, which is the soundscape around us.
So, you know, when you’re doing a location recording, wind is not your friend, is it? And that’s why, you know, we have ADR on almost all films because you just can’t get the clean, powerful, rich sound you want if you’re doing a location recording because of the sound around us. And most people are oblivious to that soundscape.
So they’ll sit in an office with buzzes, hums, noises going on and their cortisol and noradrenaline being driven through the roof and stress reactions and fatigue happening and wonder why it is they’re so knackered at the end of the day.
What’s the noise? Noise is the number one complaint in modern offices and in hospitals and it’s the number one problem in schools, you know, everywhere, but we’ve become desensitized.
So, just as in your industry, where to me, sound is 90 % of the emotional impact of a movie, and yet it gets 5 % of the budget and gets tacked on at the end, you know, universally. That’s the same in architecture. American architects train for five years, and they might spend two days on acoustics if they’re lucky in that time.
So it’s not surprising that so many spaces that we live in, work in, heal in, play in, whatever are terrible acoustically, because architects are focused entirely on how things look, not on how things sound. And we spend 93%, I think it is, of our lives indoors. And a huge amount of that is in spaces which are not fit for us because they are terrible acoustically.
So this kind of numbness is doing all sorts of damage.
Neil Hillman:
Let’s come back to acoustics because that’s definitely something we’d like to talk to you about. But I’m interested to pick up on the concept of sending and receiving because that’s such an interesting relationship.
Could we start off by thinking about the sending part where it’s not only important for our listeners to hear a compelling message, but the way that we transmit that to them is compelling too. What are the deadly sins are speaking that we’re all guilty of?
And I’m probably doing it right the way through this interview, of course. I don’t think so.
Julian Treasure:
Well, yeah, in that TED Talk, the one that went ballistic, I talked about seven deadly sins, which is a, you know, slightly tongue in cheek. They’re not really deadly sins, but they are habits which if they become quite dominant in our communication, They make us hard to listen to and they reduce the power of our sending, that’s for sure. So gossip is the first one, speaking ill of people not present and it’s often untrue. So gossips are people who aren’t necessarily your best friend, not people you trust or believe because they tend to be making stuff up or propagating and untruths.
So gossip is one, negativity is another one, which I joked is the British national pastime, you know, it kind of crosses over into the next one, complaining. Those are both things which are, you know, hard to be around if somebody’s an inveterate, negative or complaining person. It’s just wearing, isn’t it?
Judgementalism is a really big one. the kind of parent whose child comes home and says, “I got 95 % in the test,” and responds by saying, “What happened to the other five?” We probably all worked in organizations run by people like that for whom nothing is ever good enough.
Praise is not really their first recourse. It’s generally criticism, what’s wrong, and so forth. It’s hard to be around somebody who’s very, very judgmental. That folds into what I was saying earlier about being right and making people wrong.
You know, Harville Hendrix, the American author, said a wonderful quote. He said, “You can either be right or be in a relationship.” And I think there’s a lot of truth in that. So, and he said, “You can’t curl up with being right at the end of the day.”
So those are four, and then we’ve got exaggeration, what the Greeks called hyperbole, which means to throw beyond. And I get very exercised by language inflation in this particular one, you know, once upon a time, it was okay to be excited about things.
Now you have to be super excited, don’t you? And that kind of language inflation has taken out a whole raft of words, which now all just mean good, you know, fantastic, amazing, unbelievable, incredible. These words actually had meanings once. Now they just all mean great. Which is a shame, I think.
Then you’ve got excuses. If it’s never your fault, you’re not going to learn much if you blame other people constantly. And that’s a tendency. Again, ego driven. We don’t like to lose face, but it’s not a productive way to be. And finally, we have dogmatism, my way or the highway, confusing opinions with facts.
And that’s endemic in the world, unfortunately. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a brilliant Substack author and he said a great thing.
He said, “You know, in science, theories are loosely held. In fact, there aren’t and really in science, there are only theories which are the current best explanation for something.
And what scientists are beavering about trying to do the whole time is disprove them and find a better one. And if we held opinions as likely as that and we were all about trying to find a better opinion, how different the world would be instead of this grim determination to hold onto an opinion and prove yourself right and make other people wrong and go to battle on the basis of that, which we’ve seen these bizarre false histories about Ukraine being used as justification for Russia invading it. It’s tragic and I think one of the great changes we could see in the world would be if people just could perceive the difference between fact and opinion and let go of their opinions.
Neil Hillman:
-Interesting. You were talking about the nature of national characteristics and you said about negativity being British. And I think we can all agree about that. But the act of exaggeration can be fun as well.
Jason and I live in Australia where positivity abounds. Just the other day I was filling up my motorcycle with petrol and I went to pay. And the young guy behind the counter said, “Are you just paying for your petrol?” So I said, “Yes.” He said “Ah, awesome! That’s awesome!” And then I got my debit card out and he said, “Putting it on the card?” So I said, “Hmm, yeah, I’m going to put it on the card.” He said, “Ah, too easy! That’s too easy!”
It was quite infectious actually, but I think you might say that his reactions were a little bit of an exaggeration!
Can we now consider the receiving part of a conversation? Obviously, the acoustics that we’re in have a huge effect on how well we can listen.
So how does that actually affect not only our listening, but our comprehension of what’s being said?
Julian Treasure:
Well, it’s critical and generally ignored again. I mean, noise and acoustics are intimately related, of course, because the worse the acoustics are in a space, the more they reflect sound back, the louder the noise becomes. And that’s a large part of the reason why noise is the number one problem in complaint in modern offices, quite apart from open planning them so that, you know, you’re surrounded by people’s conversation, which we’re programmed to decode, we have no ear lids. And so if you’re having to listen to other people speaking, it’s reducing your productivity by up to two thirds in an office for kind of mental work for solo working, which is frightening.
Yes, acoustics. I mean, I’ve been involved with, it’s a great deal. I give talks to the American Institute of Acoustics almost every year about this because, as I say, architects really don’t think about it very much.
If you ask an architect to show you his or her work, you’ll see pictures, models, walkthroughs, none of them ever involve sound.
And yet people have to live in these spaces and work in these spaces. And architects Unfortunately love hard surfaces, steel, glass, metal, you know, of all kinds, plaster board. I mean, it’s all hard reflective stuff. The effect of this is that we live in some spaces which are really unpleasant.
So we can damp those down and there’s some wonderful products on the market now. I’ve done a lot of work with Armstrong ceilings in America, you know, and they’ve amazed me with some of the products, they’re beautiful.
You can print onto them. They can be rafts suspended from ceilings. They can they can be all sorts of looks and feel. So it’s not just boring ceiling tiles anymore. So we can do wonderful things.
You can perforate wood, perforate metal. These things can look fantastic. So we can damp spaces down. We can also block sound from jumping into the next space so you can hear next door’s conversations which we don’t want generally, especially in spaces like hospitals, and this is important to do.
I talk about four steps to designing good sound in a space and acoustics is number one and it’s important to understand the basics of acoustics of you know that sound will reflect or be absorbed or be transmitted as it hits a surface.
That’s easy to remember. It’s RAT: reflect, absorb, transmit. And it just depends on what the surface is, how much of the sound does each of those three things. The second stage, once you’ve got good acoustics and you know, ruler thumb, meeting rooms, reverberation time less than half a second, definitely.
Offices, reverberation time, not much more than one second in an open-plan type office. Otherwise, you’re moving into a space that’s very echoey and not easy to work with. How many meeting rooms have you and I been in, which are glass walled boxes where there’s nothing soft at all in them, and you’ve got standing waves at exactly the frequency of the human voice, bouncing back and forth so you get horrible resonances.
And then somebody sticks a big screen on the wall and says, oh, we’ve got great video conferencing facility here with one of those horrible little devices in the middle of a table for 20 people. It’s not video conferencing, you know. It’s audio conferencing with optional video. If the screen breaks, you can carry on perfectly well in sound. If the sound goes down, what are you going to do?
Yes. Acoustics, number one. Number two is noise. Controlling noise, not putting noisy devices into workspaces, trying to make sure that you’re not creating unnecessary noise, which can come down to things like HVAC, heating / ventilation / air conditioning equipment. How many times have we been in the office where the air conditioning goes off at six o ‘clock and everybody goes, “Oh,” because we weren’t even aware of this harm, buzz, constant noise. We will habituate to a constant sound and cease to listen to it, but it’s still there.
And I’m pretty sure there’s something in our brain going constantly. I’m not listening to that. I’m still not listening to that. It takes work somewhere. It’s fatiguing.
So that’s the second thing is to control noise. The third thing is then a sound system. If you’re gonna put sound into a space for goodness sake, make it appropriate quality in terms of the sound system. You know, we’ve got amazing things happening in sound systems today in public spaces, thanks to the invention of the line array really by L-Acoustics some years ago.
And now we’ve got the ability, instead of train stations with huge great horns, 30 meters up in the air echoing, so you can’t understand a word they’re saying. You’ve got little line arrays down at the ear level where you can hear perfectly clearly, thank you very much for what’s being said. And in airports, the same thing.
That kind of stuff, we’ve got beam steering now for loudspeakers where we can target where the sound is going. We’ve even got beam steered microphones so you can have a panel in the ceiling above a meeting table and the mics will pick out automatically the person who’s speaking, mute everybody else and you get crystal clear transmission of sound from a big meeting instead of the old echoey thing of something on the table picking up the whole room as well.
Audio technology is moving on rapidly and how many times have we been in a shopping mall where some bright spark has said, “Oh, we’ve got a sound system. Why don’t we play some nice music for people?” Forgetting that the sound system was installed for life safety purposes only.
And so we walk around and all we can hear is, “tss-tss-tss-tss”. Don’t even know what song it is. It’s just fast -paced. It’s speeding me up and annoying me at the same time.
Which isn’t the best thing to do to shoppers, really. Now, the fourth thing, once we’ve controlled acoustics, we’ve controlled noise, and we’ve got a sound system that’s appropriate, is soundscaping; is to put in, to design some sound that’s actually the best sound you could have in that space, which may be silence, in which case, you don’t need a sound system, but in other places, it’s lovely to have some sort of well -designed soundscape, which is supporting the activity in the space.
Now, I was involved a couple of years ago and it’s one of the reasons why I stopped the sound agency; actually, it launched off a separate company to do the main thing the sound agency was doing then. And that’s create beautiful, biophilic, generative soundscapes in public spaces, mainly offices these days.
That company is called Moodsonic and it’s doing really well now around the world, installing soundscapes in offices for lots of the world’s biggest brands and companies.
So I think there is a chance that we’re going to see a difference to the blighted lives of countless millions of people in open-plan offices by installing some lovely sound, because we now know from research that nature sound is good for us. It’s good for our well -being. Wind, water and birds, the gentler versions of those, they make us they reduce stress.
They reduce fatigue. They’re physiologically and psychologically very good for us, and they’re also quite good sound-maskers, especially running water, because it stops you from hearing sibilants and sibilants are the main way that we perceive language.
It’s why you can’t understand somebody shouting from a long way away very well because you can’t hear the consonants. So they both improve productivity and improve wellbeing, these lovely soundscapes. And for years, the sound agency was putting those into shopping malls and places like that instead of mindless music and improving those environments dramatically.
So those are four steps to good sound in any environment and anybody listening to this, you know, I do urge you at home at work to start savouring the sound around you.
Close your eyes, sit and listen and ask yourself three questions. Is this sound the most productive or effective sound I could have in this space?
Is it appropriate? And does it make me happy? And then you can start to perhaps notice those buzzes, hums, and annoying noises that you’ve been living with for possibly years.
Jason Nicholas:
I worked for over a decade in one of the largest teacher unions in Australia for public schools, and it was an ongoing discussion there, and it wasn’t just a background concern but a serious pedagogical issue, about the acoustics of classrooms in common spaces and schools, and most schools could not have been designed worse for learning. We actually had a number of industrial disputes where teachers had severely damaged their voices and /or their hearing over time trying to teach in these environments.
Why, when something such as lighting or temperature would be so readily apparent and issued to resolve, it sounds such a neglected area in education, especially.
Julian Treasure:
We’ve all got stories of the disasters of trendy architects creating schools that easy to clean perhaps, and of course,
COVID’s only made this worse because it’s become even more important to be able to clean surfaces, which means hard surfaces. It’s much harder to clean soft surfaces. So it’s had a bad effect actually on the spaces that we’re all now reoccupying.
Schools are bad, hospitals are bad, offices are bad, even hotels are bad. I mean, it’s across the board really. And I so share your frustration about the sound in schools, the acoustics of schools, which are not thought about. And there are no standards even in the UK. There are no enforceable standards. There are guidelines that people readily ignore for cost reasons or because they can’t be bothered.
And the result is that many, many students in schools can’t hear. Not only that, I often say it’s quite possible that many teachers are shortening their lives by working in these environments, because we now know that to be exposed chronically to noise levels of 65 decibels or more– and that’s not that loud, is it? Raise your voice it’s 65 decibels. You’re not even shouting at full volume. But if you’re exposed to that over a long period of time, the research now shows that you are increasing your risk of heart attack and stroke.
And teachers, by definition, are working in that environment day after day after day, especially with group work going on in rooms with terrible acoustics. Very often, it’s much louder than that. But 65 dB happens to be the average noise of all that was established in a survey of German schools not so long ago. So this isn’t scaremongering. This is happening around us.
The children can’t hear their education. And of course, who sits at the back of the class where it’s even harder to hear? The naughty kids. So, you know, there are whole sections of the population who go through education having received very little of it, really. And that’s expensive because you have to have teachers, assistants at the back and so forth translating or helping. We’ve got, you know, people with different cultures and languages who are having to translate as they listen in schools, and being compromised by the terrible acoustics all the time.
The teachers are having to shout, so yes, you know, in the UK there was a famous case of a teacher who sued the government for losing her voice because of shouting constantly in one. And I’m not sure if that’s happened in Australia, but I wouldn’t be surprised. So teachers lose their voice and the stress levels on everybody in that environment are enormous, on the children trying to listen, on the teachers trying to be heard. There’s a great study that was done. I did a talk at a big event sponsored by ACAFON some years ago in London, and also in three other countries around Europe.
It was based on a study that they had sponsored in a school in Essex. What they did was they changed the acoustics of, I think it was three classrooms, one had no acoustic treatment, and this was visually imperceptible, so all the ceilings looked exactly the same, and they would go in at the weekend and swap it all around. So one had no acoustic treatment at all, one had acoustic treatment that reduced the reverberation down to, I think it was around a second, and one went further than that. And then they assessed over a long period of time as they kept changing these things around, they assessed the effect. And the effects were dramatic. In terms of stress levels, absolutely enormous difference. In terms of outcomes, teaching outcomes, also vast improvements. As you reduce the reverberation time, people could hear better, they worked better, the behaviour got better socially.
The whole thing was transformed. And yet, as you say, we spend so much time not thinking about this. And to me, this is like watering a garden and missing the plants altogether, missing the flowers. I mean, it’s such a waste, such a waste, it’s tragic.
And, you know, we just need to keep banging this drum because unfortunately, noise is not a political issue. You don’t get politicians saying vote for me, I’ll make it quieter.
Neil Hillman:
So there’s an economic case to be made to improve the acoustics of classrooms when you balance the cost of the extra teachers and the special needs of children compared to the modest one -off cost of the physical products that are used to improve the acoustics.
Julian Treasure:
Yeah, for sure. And it’s not just sound, actually, because architecture is now really waking up to sustainability. And, you know, for a few years, I’ve been a sound concept advisor for the Well Building standard, which is of the three standards in the world, you know, building, you’ve got well-lead embryo, that I’m aware of, the three major standards. Well is the one that really focuses on people’s experience.
The other two are much more about the building and how sustainable it is and so forth, whereas well is about how enjoyable, how healthy is it to be in there for people.
And this is something I’m always berating the acousticians about because normally if you start talking to an acoustician, they’ll start waving graphs and charts and talking about vibrations in soffits and things.
And my point is, if there’s nobody in the building, I don’t care, what is it doing to people? That’s the key thing. So acoustics really is a science which needs to be about people, much more than it is about sound. And that’s kind of, that’s why I wrote the new book, Sound Affects, about the relationship between people and sound, because that’s what interests me.
Jason Nicholas:
Also more broadly, we can talk about the changes in the natural environment of sound over the past several centuries since the Industrial Revolution as well.
There are very few natural environments that aren’t impacted by noise. I think people still think there’s quiet spaces out there, but there’s jet noise.
There’s all kinds of industrial noise that impact on this. What’s the cumulative effect of this on people and everything else in the world as well?
Julian Treasure:
Well, indeed. I’ve interviewed Gordon Hempton in the book about his “One Square Inch”, which has been devastated. He told me after a … I mean, I don’t know if you really know about one square inch, but he had a small inch pebble which he painted red and put into a space in Washington, in a national park, and was trying to defend the peace that you would hear if you stood next to that stone. Is it silent?
Is it I mean not silence, but just nature sound; and he managed to get people very exercised by this, that it became a movement and they managed to create this wonderful space, until the US Army Air Force discovered that population density was incredibly small in that area and scheduled it for low altitude overflying on a regular basis.
It’s gone. Totally gone. Well Gordon responded by getting involved in doing a very good thing, which is setting up a new organization called Quiet Parks International. I don’t know if you’ve come across that, but it’s very good. You can look it up on the internet and they are assembling a list of the world’s quiet places. It’s a kind of Wiki style. So people are putting forward places where they believe you can still go and experience quiet.
Now, it’s not a disaster. Even in New York, you’ve got a high line. There are places, there are parks, there are places that people care about and they’re defending where you can experience peace, relative peace, even in cities, which is very important because more than half the world’s population live in cities now and, you know, they’re not going to experience much biophilic sound in cities, unfortunately. But the effect of noise is dramatic and most cities are much, much, much louder than that.
I mean, particularly in the middle and far east, particularly in India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, you know, there are noise levels in those cities, average noise levels of 110 decibels. Oh my goodness. You know, have you ever been to Mumbai? It’s terrifying.
You know, the street noise is beyond belief. Now, again, as I wrote, as I’ve written in the new book, there are people combating this. And, you know, there have been advances. The Indian street policemen in Mumbai have noise meters now, or some of them do at least.
So there are people pushing back against this increasing tide, but you know, R. Murray Schafer I think estimated the increase in the world’s noise level inexorably, and it is inexorable, because it’s linearly related or correlated with a number of people. We’re not going to be reducing that anytime soon.
So as more and more people, more and more noise, and he, I think, came to the conclusion it was doubling every 10 years, was it? Something like that, which is pretty frightening. I think it was half a decibel a year, which would be about that. Now, I don’t know if it’s accelerating or decelerating. I don’t know if anybody’s done any work on that, but we need to pay attention to this.
The cost of noise to society, to countries is absolutely vast. It’s been estimated up to 3 % of GDP, which is billions and billions and billions of pounds, dollars, euros, whatever currency you’re working in, which is about people being sleep deprived at night and getting ill, people being hurt by sound constantly around them, creating, as we said earlier, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, all sorts of diseases are associated with chronic exposure to noise. And of course, noise kills.
I mean, sudden noise, if you happen to be somebody who’s got a slightly dodgy heart or whatever and you’re standing on a train station looking the wrong way and an express train comes in from behind you, it’s a really big shock.
And that can easily kill you. And it does. So there’s a kind of pyramid that’s been established over the years, where the vast base, millions and millions and millions of people are being annoyed, stressed, fatigued. And then you go up to the heart attack kind of, you know, increased risk of serious illness. And at the top, you have people actually being killed by sound. So it’s a huge issue in the world.
We need to start paying attention. We need to start listening.
Jason Nicholas:
Are there ways, especially for those of us who live in noisy environments, to develop a practice of listening despite everything working against this? And Also, I’m aware I’m asking the question from a specific cultural perspective. Do you know who’s getting this right in the midst of what we consider the modern world?
Julian Treasure:
I haven’t seen anybody particularly getting it right. There are movements in the world, as I said, with the quiet parks, and these things spring up from time to time. I hope QPI is successful, and you can point to things like Shinrin Yoku, the forest bathing, which is an increasingly popular movement, taking people into nature sound and having them be with it and appreciate it.
I mean, yes, there are green shoots, perhaps, but until we start teaching children about their hearing and about the value of listening, the skill of listening, which of course most people don’t even realize is a skill at all, then I don’t think we’re going to make much progress. It has to come down to that kind of educational realization.
And to me, just every time I think about it, I can’t understand why it is. Why would it be that we don’t teach children first how to listen and then expect them to listen? It doesn’t make any sense it all to me.
Jason Nicholas:
Well, this is a really pertinent thing for my wife and I. We have a two -year -old, so what are some things that we can be doing to teach her to listen well?
Julian Treasure:
Well, the first and most important thing is to listen to her. That’s how children learn to listen by being listened to. So for any parent, you need to go down to their level, I mean physically, ideally, or raise them to your level. So you’re looking eye to eye and listening. And then you can use, I mean, I teach these days, I teach a process called RVSEC, which is very powerful in conflict, but it works all the time everywhere, really. And the R is reflect, which is what many people call active listening, which is to reflect back what you just heard. So you can do that with a two year old, no problem at all. “I hear that you want a banana.” That’s absolutely fine.
Then you’re leaving the other person feeling heard, which is the first step. People want to be heard, understood and valued. So you’ve just done step one there. The second part of RVSEC is the biggest single missing thing in the world now, I think, which is validation. That is to say, even if you disagree with somebody, you can do this. And in fact, it’s very important to understand that.
So I might say, “Jason, I really don’t agree with what you just said, but I completely understand why you would think that.” So I haven’t made you wrong. And in fact, two people can be right and have very different views because they have different backgrounds, different perspectives, whatever it may be. So it takes out that making wrong. So, you know, in terms of our two -year -old conversation, I hear you want a banana. I expect you’re hungry. Validation. And that moves through the next phase, which is summary. “So should we go and get you a banana?”
The word so is very powerful in conversation. in a long conversation, you can close doors in the long corridor of a conversation by using so and summarizing.
So we’ve all agreed this, now we can move on to that. The E is empathize, which perhaps I just did with “I expect you’re hungry”. But to be on the other person’s island understand their feelings particularly and make sense of it from their perspective.
And then once you’ve done reflect, validate, summarize, empathize, you can then create something positive, even if you have different views.
The Greeks used to talk about thesis and antithesis combining to create synthesis. So you can put two opposing views on the table in front of you both and say,
“Right now, how can we create something with our two different perspectives?” And it is a great way of resolving conflict, and I wish it would happen in the world instead of pointing the finger and making people wrong. You know, that’s a tool I really commend to people.
Neil Hillman:
I see so much evidence now of an increasing interest in what might be described as the lay study of frequencies. I don’t know, 50 years ago, people may have been interested in something else out there, like astrology or numerology. But I do notice more and more alternative therapies and online content referring to frequencies, the very definition of sound. Is this all psychobabble or pseudoscience? Or is there a very good basis for people becoming more attuned to their personal vibration? Is it beneficial for humans to somehow resonate at a high frequency?
Julian Treasure:
Well, first of all, we are more than 50 % water, and water is a very, very good conveyor of sound. And so also every particle of us is vibrating, actually right down to subatomic particles. So atoms vibrate, molecules vibrate, cells vibrate, cells here as well, they sense vibration around them, it’s very important for them, and it’s even been established. Now, again I write about this in the book, that cells make sound and so every part of us is vibrating, and quite a lot of it is making sound. There’s a model of health which is about harmony and which would posit that all ill health or illnesses about disharmony of some kind.
There’s a long tradition going back thousands of years of sound healing from chanting, bowls, resonant bodies, whatever it may be. I have a suspicion that in years to come, we’ll discover pretty much what we discovered with modern medicine, which is many, many, many modern pills and remedies are descended from herbalism, from plants that people used to use. And for a long time, unfortunately, people set about burning those people at stakes, as witches. When they were using knowledge that had been handed down over thousands of years at that plant, if you apply it in this way, will help that condition.
And now we’ve discovered there’s a chemical in that plant, so we synthesize it, make it into pills, and it’s all very mainstream. I wouldn’t be surprised if in years to come a lot of the ancient knowledge about sound healing is discovered to have had scientific basis and we are using sound in even more sophisticated ways than we do now.
Of course, we do use it now, lithotripsy, smashing solid gall stones or bladder stones or whatever it is, they break up; ultrasound to see babies or to treat all sorts of conditions. So we know sound has effects on the human body and we know it can be used.
So I would think the answer to your question is watch this space. But having said that, there is an awful lot of woo-woo stuff around. There are a lot of people selling snake oil. All I would say is, you know, try stuff out. And if it works for you, well, congratulations.
You know, I’m not set up to judge it. I have to be a bit careful. I mean, I don’t want to be promoting things. You know, you think about binaural beats, for example. Well, it’s been well established that brainwaves can be entrained by sound, just like every other part of our body.
But first of all, we don’t even understand brainwaves. And it’s, you know, it is pretty reductive to start talking about a brain being an alpha or beta or gamma or whatever.
It’s not. There are huge numbers of different frequencies going on inside the brain all the time. One or two of them may be dominant, but we don’t really know what that means,
particularly. We don’t understand enough about it. And then you have the kind of snake oil salespeople who are promising that you can become a Buddhist monk in half an hour by putting a pair of headphones on.
It’s not gonna happen. So just be careful about people over promising, but by all means, try things out because sound is immensely powerful and I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of what it does to us and what it could do to us.
So, you know, this is part of the process of becoming more conscious about sound and exploring it by all means try it out.
Neil Hillman:
Julian, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk with you today.
I think that we could have gone on for hours and gone down very many different routes as well. Perhaps you can come back a little bit later in the series and we can pick up on some of the questions that I’m sure many listeners will be leaving comments about.
But I am certain that we and many of our listeners will be paying even greater attention to both the way we speak and the way that we listen to others. And that surely can only be a good thing. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Julian Treasure:
My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me guys. It’s been a joy.
Neil Hillman:
Julian’s latest book, Sound Affects will be published later this year, and all of Julian’s TED Talk links are in the notes for today’s show, along with access to his books, websites and contact details.
Jason Nicholas:
And just as a reminder, have a look at the show notes to find contact details for me as a dialogue editor for hire, as well as links to Neil’s sound coaching for both experienced and developing professionals.
And of course, if you’ve enjoyed the show, please subscribe, it’s completely free, and it would be great if you could let others know about the podcast as well.
