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I love that TED intro music!
Sound affects you all the time.
You may not have thought about that before,
but I'm gonna take you right back to the beginning;
this is the first sound that you ever heard:
(Heartbeat sound) your mother's heartbeat.
You were conscious of this sound from around 12 weeks after conception.
At that point you have no ears!
And right now, you're hearing not just with your ears,
but also with your whole body.
You hear through your skin, your muscle, your bone,
it all conducts sounds.
Your ears of course are the specialist organs,
and they're incredible organs.
The smallest sound that you can hear
moves your eardrums just 3 atomic diameters.
The loudest sound that you can tolerate
is a trillion times more powerful than that.
Your ears are always on, you have no earlids.
They're working 24 hours a day, even when you sleep,
if you think about it, while you're asleep, if there's a strange noise
that you're not familiar with in your house, you wake up immediately.
Your ears are the primary warning to you.
If I want to warn you of something, I don't wave at you, I'll shout.
And yet, we are not very good at listening. And why is that?
Well, hearing is a sense and listening is a skill.
Of course, all of you have been taught how to listen.
Haven't you? Hands up who's been taught how to listen.
Oh dear!
It should be on the curriculum.
And it's not. It is here maybe, and not in many schools.
Listening is a real skill, it's a relationship with sound
that we have to develop,
and Ernest Hemingway, I think, said it very well,
"Most people really do never listen."
There are listening positions, have you ever thought about that?
Here's something you can have fun with.
I'll give you one example of listening positions:
men tend to listen in a reductive way, that is listening for a point.
So in conversations a man will say,
"I got this problem", the other guy will say, "Here's the solution!"
"Thanks very much." Done and dusted, end of conversation.
That's the way we tend to talk.
Women on the other hand tend to listen expansively:
just being with that person, listening, no particular objective,
no place to go, just being there.
And boys, if you wanna have success with girls,
then I strongly advise you start to explore expansive listening.
(Laughter)
If they've had a bad day, they don't want to hear,
"Have a bath, you'll be alright." (Laughter)
They wanna hear, "You poor thing, tell me about it." That's expansive listening.
There are many listening positions, listening is a real skill,
and one of the things I want to get you to do is to start listening more consciously.
The trouble is, we're surrounded by noise!
(Traffic noise)
We start listening to the world, there's noise everywhere around us:
noise of transport, noise of industry.
The reaction if you've got unpleasant sound
when you're a little baby is you put your fingers in your ears,
Well now people do that in a more --
(Loud ringing sound)
-- subtle way. Sound affects you all the time.
Sounds like that, that was a little short of cortisol I gave you,
your fight-or-flight hormone.
Sound is affecting your hormone secretions,
your breathing, your heart rate,
physiologically, sound is affecting you all the time through the days.
And that's just the first of four ways sound affects you.
The second is psychologically. (Wave sound)
By the way, that's the sound of a surf, which is a very calming sound,
so physiologically we can have sound [unclear]
physiologically that will calm you down.
Psychologically sound affects you powerfully as well. (Albinoni's adaggio)
Music, I don't have to tell people here,
is a powerful emotional affector
and we've just seen a beautiful piece of choral music.
I don't know about you, but that made me feel deep emotion immediately.
This piece of music won't make you feel happy, it wasn't designed to.
(Birds chirping) Not just music though, birds song for example
is the sound that makes most people feel secure.
Because we've learned of a hundred thousands of years
when the birds are singing, you're safe.
It's when they stop you need to be worried.
So at a deep level it's a reassuring sound.
Also nature's alarm clock, makes you feel you more alert.
The third way sound affects us is cognitive -
you can't understand two people talking at once (Recorded voice)
or one person talking twice.
(Laughter)
You can understand about 1.6 people talking at the same time,
which is why people who have to work in offices
with sound like this (Office noises)
have their productivity absolutely decimated.
Whatever number you're thinking of
in a drop in productivity is probably not as bad as this,
(Suspense music)
Most offices are open plan now,
and if people are having other people's conversation interrupting,
that little bit of bandwith that we've got
that we use for [unclear] symbols,
that is the result.
The Fourth Way sound affects us is behaviourally.
(Thumping music) So with all that other stuff going on, ask yourself,
Is this person ever going to drive at a steady 28 mph?
I don't think so.
You're familiar, any of you who drive is familiar with that,
the music's pumping, the foot goes down.
If I play this -- (Pneumatic drill noise)
for more than a few seconds,
you would start to feel pretty uncomfortable.
And if I left it on for 10 minutes you'd all be gone.
For people who can't get away from sound like that, it's devastating.
In fact, noise is a real problem in society,
and it causes immense ill health, the European Union estimates
25% of Europe's population are having their health
really affected badly by noise, largely through sleep deprivation.
The World Health Organization estimates that 200,000 people a year
are being killed by noise because
long term exposure to noise increases
ischemic heart disease and those are the results.
So, those are the ways that sound affects us,
(Jingle noise) and in retail,
it's affecting business massively.
If a shop sounds awful, you just leave.
You don't complain, you just leave.
And that's the result that's happening out there in the shops of the world.
It's part of the work that we do, it's to try and change retail soundscapes for the better.
Now this is what most people take refuge in,
(Music through headphones)
and if you have one of these, and we just saw a wonderful video
on the way this can be used constructutively and powerfully,
there are certain effects of that which may not be so good socially,
for example there's a phenomenon called schizophonia,
which is a dislocate between what you see and what you hear.
So we sit on train carriages for example,
and it's full of jolly, lively conversations,
none of it with the people in that train carriage.
It's always people outside the train carriage
and there's this dislocate when somebody
sitting next to me giving their credit card number
over their phone, ignoring me completely,
there's a certain sense of isolation:
there's a connection there and isolation here,
it's a social phenomenon we need to watch.
And the second thing, (booming noise) is something I really want to get across,
to all of you who use MP3 players and have earbud headphones or any kind of headphones,
noise-induced hearing loss, 1 in 6 American teenagers
are losing their hearing because
they have their headphones too loud.
Hours and hours a week of loud music
delivered deep into your ears will kill your hearing.
And you will end up, when you get to my age,
with severely limited hearing.
A rule-of-thumb for headphones I'll come on to in a moment,
because what I want to talk about is not so much the negative,
the way sound can damage you,
but positive ways that sound can enhance your health.
And here are three ways you can love your ears,
those wonderful organs that I'm talking about.
The first is, in a noisy world, get some protection.
The picture on the left of this slide shows
silicone moulded hearing protectors. I have a pair of these,
I'm a musician, I'm a drummer, and it's essential for me, when I play gigs,
that I have those in, they attenuate everything by 15 db.
Formula 1 drivers wear them.
If you go to night clubs, I can assure you
the DJ is not stupid, the DJ is wearing these.
It's the people who go repeatedly without any protection,
who are damaging themselves. So don't be one of those.
You can get cheaper versions of course.
The second way you can love your ears is if you're going to wear headphones,
then try to get the best ones you can.
It's worth investing because if you've got better quality sounds
coming into your ears, you can have less quantity.
Generally, if headphones are very, very poor,
you have to turn them up to get the same effect.
Watch out for headphone creep, that's the phenomenon
when you have it on at a reasonable level to start with,
and then a little bit later you have to turn it up to get the same effect,
and then you turn it up, and you end up with 100 db going deep in.
Quality not quantity all the time.
And the third way you can love your ears,
if you're in an urban environment for example where there's a road drill,
or as I have to do many times, you travel on the London tube,
where the train is coming it can make the most appalling noise, 110 bd.
Just put your fingers in your ears. It's not stupid.
I think there's a kind of bravado that people often have when they feel
they've got to stand there and take this stuff. Well, don't.
If you're in a restaurant and it's too loud, complain.
If you're by a loud noise, walk away,
or stick your fingers in your ears and just protect yourself.
And I wanted just, coming to the end of this,
talking about sound that can actually create health in people.
Sound is used by professionals to create health,
and here are a couple of ways that that happens,
we may have come across ultrasound, for example,
which is used by physiotherapists to aid healing,
it's now being used to break down cancer cells as well.
So ultrasound is a very powerful form of professional sound use,
and here's another huge area. I mean
there's a tradition going back thousands of years of using sound for healing,
in lots of different ways, whether it be tribal chanting, medicine men chanting,
these days, there's a more scientific application of that,
and that's music therapy.
And there are some amazing organisations around the world,
using music to cure all sorts of conditions.
And here are just some of the conditions which music therapy is being used in.
There is some wonderful work being used,
where for example stroke patients are being taught to talk again by singing.
They can't initially vocalize, but as they start to sing the words,
they become able to communicate again.
And I was just talking to Jonathan about the way that music,
-- he's been involved in this --
music can open the doors to communicate with people who have been mute.
That's true also of many, many other conditions as you can see on that slide.
So music therapy is very powerful.
Those are professional ways that we can use sound for health.
What can you do in your life?
Well, I'm gonna give you a few tips.
And this is the first one:
silence is not something that we often come across these days.
It's rare in urban environment to encounter it at all.
Seek it out!
The Elizabethans described conversation as decorated silence.
Now that's a nice concept, isn't it?
I urge you to start thinking about silence as your base,
and decorating it with the sound that you make, rather than just noise.
Silence is a very, very valuable sound.
It's a bit like sorbet in a meal,
it resets your ears. If you can encounter silence
a little bit every day, not all the time,
-- you know, I'm not in favour of everybody walking around like trappist monks --
but just like with food,
with sound it's important to have a balanced diet coming in.
Second, you can seek out these three friends,
I wonder if you can guess what WWB stands for, (water noise)
you will as this slide reveals,
these are the natural sounds that we've evolve to in the hundred thousands of years,
Wind, Water, Birds. (Birds chirping)
Water in the form of running water and also in the form of rainfall.
And I often think that when people feel the need, walking into a quiet room,
to turn on the radio, or turn on a TV, this is what they're pining for.
We've been used to this all our lives.
Only in the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution
have we invented electromechanical noise,
or first mechanical, now electromechanical noise,
and surrounded ourselves with all this noise.
In cities, you don't hear much of wind, water, birds.
And that's a shame!
So seek it out. I think it's healthy.
And we also find that sort of staccastic sound,
composed of lots of little individual random events
very calming and very easy to set aside.
It's good to work too. If you're in one of these noisy offices,
take a pair of headphones and put on some bird songs or some gentle rainfall,
and you'll get all your productivity back.
You know the feeling of lying in bed with the window open,
listening to gentle rain outside.
That's what I'm talking about.
The third way that you can love your ears,
sorry, the third way you can improve your health with sound, is to listen.
Hopefully, after this conversation, you'll move into conscious listening.
[Technical sound problem]
My vision for the world is to have everybody consciously listening.
Not putting up with noise, not ignoring it,
not in this knee-jerk reaction we have
of just suppressing sound and pretending it doesn't exist.
You know, when you stand on a street corner, bellowing at somebody,
if you could see that or smell it,
you wouldn't stand there and put up with it.
So let's listen consciously, and take control of the sonic environment.
Let's start to design the sound around us.
Second, train your voice!
Probably not many of you, well I'm talking to a special audience here,
but not many students have been taught how to use their voice.
Again it should be on the curriculum.
The voice is an instrument that we all play.
You've just heard it beautifully played.
But I'm not talking about taking it to that level of expertise,
but certainly so that you can stand on a stage
and talk effectively like this, to become a master of intonation,
of pause, of timing, of emphasis, and so forth.
And make music.
Music is wonderful. It's a great social activity,
There's not a human society on the planet that doesn't have music.
If you go to Africa and say "I can't sing" or "I can't play,"
they'll look at you as if you're crazy.
We've created this artificial divide between musicians and audience.
That's nonsense.
We're all musicians. We can all make music.
And all of the research I've seen
shows that the people who make music are healthier.
It's good for you to do.
If you can't make music, if you really have a block about it,
listen to music that's got positive emotional content.
Whatever that is for you!
There is a research that shows that some music
may have negative emotional content that's not good for health,
so I wouldn't say that listening for hours a day to --
I don't know, just picking a genre at random, trash metal,
may not be particularly good for you,
maybe it is for some people, this is very personal.
But music is a great thing to engage with.
So I hope I've given you some steps in this talk
to use sound for own health.
It's really important that we take control of the soundscapes
and that we all work together
to create a more beautiful sounding world.
And that's what sound health is all about.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)