This is a lovely little talk by Julian Treasure on a very basic level about how sound affects us..

Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices.

  • “[Ocean surf] has the frequency of roughly 12 cycles per minute. And … 12 cycles per minute is [also] roughly the frequency of the breathing of a sleeping human. There is a deep resonance with being at rest.”
  • “Birdsong is a sound which most people find reassuring. There is a reason for that. Over hundreds of thousands of years we’ve learned that when the birds are singing, things are safe. It’s when they stop you need to be worried.”
  • “You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms.”
  • “Sound is complex. There are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.”
  • “The world is now so noisy with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it’s just hard to listen; it’s tiring to listen.”
  • “We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we’re not very good at it. We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.”

Better Listening- Julian Treasure

In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, “We are losing our listening.” In this short, fascinating talk, Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening — to other people and the world around you.

Sound Health…

our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health — even costing lives. He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) and restore our relationship with sound.