As parents, we tend to be in Tell rather than Listen mode.
— Julian Treasure
Someone else's paper is fascinating until you buy it yourself. Then it loses its appeal, and you have to pass it on to someone else to reinvigorate it.
When you hear a child's voice, it will have that immediate effect of putting you in mind of looking after children.
If we teach our children how to listen properly to the world - and especially to each other - they will understand the consequences of their own sound and be far more responsible in making it.
Unlike so many other sounds, there's no maximum exposure to birdsong.
My dream is to make the world sound better, but the only way to do that is to let businesses see that there is profit in it.
Without our natural soundscape, we are making ourselves tired, stressed, and frightened all at the same time.
Retailers don't think about why they have music. There are a number of issues. It can be very powerful in the right place, where it is played appropriately.
It is a mistake to assume that everyone listens like you do: your listening is as unique as your fingerprints, and so is everyone else's.
Most people think it's a linear relationship: I speak, you listen. Actually, it's a circle, because the way you listen affects how I speak, and the way I speak affects the way you listen.
Sound in a space affects us profoundly. It changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretion, brain waves. It affects our emotions and our cognition.
It would be some sort of shock horror story if a child left school unable to read or write. But we do not teach explicitly, or test in the main, either speaking or - much more importantly - listening.
A sonic logo on its own isn't going to do very much. We get frustrated with smaller brands who come to us and say, 'We need a bing-bong'. You just can't encapsulate a brand for £500 in a three-second sound. It doesn't work.
The desire to be right can be very destructive in relationships.
I've heard many reports of police attending scenes of domestic violence where they've had to turn off music and televisions and radios. Noise tends to drive us a bit crazy.
Music is designed to be listened to, so it's calling for attention all the time, syphoning off our very limited auditory bandwidth and elbowing aside our ability to listen to the voice in our head we need when we're doing mental work.
It's dangerous to generalise about sound because many of its effects work through association. These can be universal: we all instinctively associate any sudden, unexpected noise with danger and react with a release of fight/flight hormones, while most people find sounds like gentle rainfall or birdsong calming and reassuring.
If we're not listened to, then that doesn't create a desire inside us to listen to others. Societally, we don't value it.
I love reading other people's papers on the Tube.
It's time architects start designing for our ears as well as our eyes.
I have visited a number of boutique hotels where you feel there is a little bit of self-indulgence going on.
Most of us walk around with our ears switched off because so much noise is unpleasant.
I often go into shops and ask them to turn the music down.
There's a little bit of protocol in the real world which is quite important. If you speak to me, we understand that we've entered into a social contract. But sound that you haven't given permission to receive is noise, and generally unwelcome.
A great deal of our work involves switching music off.
You can't truly listen to someone and do anything else at the same time.
In a room full of 60 to 70 people which is open plan and absolutely quiet, it's very intimidating to make a phone call. And if you do so, you're upsetting about 15 to 20 people because they're put off by your phone call.
We experience every space in five senses, so it's strange that architects design just for the eyes.
Conscious listening is very largely overlooked in the mainstream of education. It's such an important skill in life. And yet we expect children to pick it up from home or from peers informally.
While interrupting is not always wrong, it should never become a habit.
We all like to look good. However, this basic human desire can often get in the way of our listening and our speaking. This tendency often evinces itself in two simple words: 'I know.' But if I know everything, what can I learn? Absolutely nothing.
If you're surrounded by noise all the time, it has a pretty bad effect on the spirit.
Sadly, piped music in so many public spaces is often just more noise. Rarely is it carefully designed to enhance our experience; much more likely it is there because retailers have subscribed to an incorrect view that music makes people spend more.
If you put music on top of noise, it's like putting icing on top of mud; it might look like a cake, but it doesn't taste like one.
This devaluing of listening is handed down from generation to generation. There are many children who don't have the experience of being listened to by their parents.
I think it's pretty pointless, my children learning to use a keyboard - we will just talk to our computers. Why would we not?
Noise is the number one problem in modern offices. A big part of addressing this issue is making sure unwanted sound from adjacent spaces doesn't intrude or interfere.
Sound changes moods, yet most of the sound around us is unplanned.
People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years, they have learnt when the birds sing, they are safe; it's when birds stop singing that people need to worry.
By starting to pay attention to our natural soundscapes, businesses can reduce staff turnover, increase productivity, and increase profits.
It's an interesting door opening, this use of sonic signalling - using sound to alert us in a more subtle way than a beep.
Music is made to be listened to, so you immediately have an issue where you're playing it in the background like wallpaper. Music doesn't want to behave like that.
If you want to be listened to, the first step is to listen well yourself.
People often mistake our mission at The Sound Agency for a crusade for silence, but actually, silence is in many ways just as bad as too much noise.
Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.
You or I never buy an Intel product explicitly, and yet their sonic logo is far better known and more powerful than its visual equivalent. It's probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The need to be right can arise from a fear of being disrespected. Or it may come out of the fear of being seen as we really are: as flawed human beings who are perfectly imperfect and full of contradictions and confusions.
In the U.K., architects train for five years, and they spend one day on sound.
All of our physical rhythms are being affected by sound outside us all the time.
Every individual's listening is as unique as his or her fingerprints because we all listen through filters that develop from our personal mix of culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations and intentions. That is why one person's musical taste is another person's hideous noise.
