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In fact, our relationship with sound looks a little bit like this.
We really have gone unconscious.
Sound doesn't just affect our hormone secretions, it effects all of our bodily rhythms.
Breathing, heart rate, even brain waves.
Because we've learned, all of us, over hundreds of thousands of years that when the birds are singing, we're safe.
Bird song makes a lot of people feel very secure, and it's only if it suddenly stops,
that you get that feeling of, "what happened?"
You cannot understand two people talking at the same time or in this case one
person talking twice. Not possible.
Even a woman cannot understand two people talking at the same time.
-Wind, water, birds-
Those are three very, very good sounds. They're all stochastic,
that means comprising lots of individual random events.
We find stochastic sound quite pleasing. There are two things happening here.
I'm sending, you're receiving,
and we have to work on both of those. It is not to be taken for granted
that when we send, we are received.
Something in the region of sixteen to eighteen percent of the school population
on any given day is dealing with a hearing impairment.
Most of it temporary but it's there nevertheless. That's a big chunk
of people who aren't going to receive very well because they simply can't hear properly.
Listening, is making meaning from the sound.
It's a conscious process, it's not natural,
and indeed we don't really teach it very much. Listening is as skill and I'm
afraid to say it's a dying skill.
It's being challenged.
I mean of course architects do have ears, the question is; do they use them in their designs?
The answer in a lot of cases is no. If you think of education as watering the
garden, which I think is a reasonable analogy,
we are wasting a lot of water.
Because if you damp the room down,
the children behave differently.
They get quieter.
Because in a society where people don't listen,
it's very difficult to start understanding each other,
and having empathy.
The benefits of doing this, quite simply,
we have a better educational system because people learn better.
The health of everybody involved
is improved and the behavior of the children is radically improved as well.
Well, ladies and gentlemen
thank you very much for listening to me today. I hope that's stirred you up. I hope
it's given you lots of ideas and I can't wait to hear what the rest of the
speakers have to say. Thank you for listening.