For 15 years, I ran a magazine publishing company and there was a phrase in the marketing industry in those days probably still exists, content is king. Well, I have to say that in terms of speaking and listening very often, context is king. We have to remember that we speak and listen in a context and that context is very often a problem. It's important to ask yourself the question about the context in which you'll be speaking, so that you can speak effectively. You wouldn't want to propose marriage in a noisy railway station or coffee bar perhaps, or have an important and complex business conversation in those places. You can think of much nicer and more supportive environments in which to speak and be heard.

The main issue with context in the most weld is, of course, noise. You might very often go out for a social occasion and find yourself in a place like this. Well, you would probably be going home with a sore throat and a sore head. Where are the soft surfaces in this room, every sound in there is going to bounce back into the room and you get a thing called the Lombard effect, where I speak a bit louder to get over you and then you speak a bit louder to get over me and the whole room ends up shouting at the top of its voice. I think you will have experienced that one. Equally.

I travel a lot and I go on planes to do that. And I very often get subjected to this whenever eliminated Well, that's very often all Usually a crew member speaking through an old fashioned telephone handset through a sound system which involves the cheapest possible loudspeakers. This is a 40 or 50 million pound aircraft, and we can't afford a good sound system. What is that about? This kind of casual noise intrusion into our lives is designed in by people who don't think about noise when they're designing spaces, or systems. The effect it has on us is to drive us crazy and not just crazy.

It doesn't just affect our happiness. It affects our effectiveness. And our well being. According to the European Union noise is reducing the health and the quality of life of at least 25% of the population of Europe. That's 127 million people at the time I wrote this in terms of lifeline. lost.

Noise is a killer directly, sometimes it causes heart attacks sub noise can certainly do that to people. But over time very much more. So chronically exposure to noise reduces life expectancy. We're losing something like a million years, every year of healthy living in Europe, a to noise which is now rated just behind air pollution as a major problem for health. The cost is 10s of billions of euros. And it's not just the cost to health systems, and employers.

It's the cost to all of us. Let me give you a couple of examples of environments where perhaps you haven't thought about it. But the sound of the environments is really affecting the way in which those environments work. Here's a place most of us care about a good deal you may have children at school schools for many years have been poorly designed in terms of acoustics when I see a classroom that looks like this All hard surfaces, I'm forced to ask myself do architects have ears at all? Because you just imagine this room with 30 kids doing group work, which is the most common way of educating Now, let me give you an example of the way acoustics affect speech intelligibility. If I set the reverberation time of this room at 1.2 seconds, which is too high, in any room where you want to be understood, you need to be well under a second.

Unfortunately, however, very typically 1.2 seconds would be applicable to classrooms. And we play recording with some simulated background noise in this particular reverberation time. This is what it sounds like. Do you fancy receiving your education like that? If I take the reverberation down to naught point four seconds by installing subacute Take measures soft surfaces sound absorbing materials on the ceiling perhaps and on the walls. This is the result.

In language infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters in arithmetic infinitely many numbers can be very different, very different. In German schools at the moment, the average noise level is found to be 65. decibel is probably due to Greek work. In this chart, the black dots are the noise level, the red dots are the teachers heart rate, the teachers heart rate. So it's not surprising therefore, that we can see the long term effects of working in that kind of environment, which is an increased risk of heart attack. It's quite possible that teachers are shortening their lives by working in that environment all the time, quite apart from losing their voices. There was a British teacher not so long ago who sued the government successfully because she lost her voice entirely.

Because She had to shout over the noise of the classroom every single day. Now, it's been shown by several studies that I've seen that reducing noise levels from that level down by introducing acoustic measures improves outcomes, and it improves health and well being and satisfaction. For everybody in the room, the teacher can speak to the class instead of shouting, and all of the class can hear the teacher. Sadly, at the moment, I think there are millions of children leaving school without ever having heard their education properly. It's like watering a garden and just missing the plants altogether tragic. Another environment which we probably care about a good deal is this one.

Now ask yourself, How on earth does anybody get well, in a place that sounds like that? These are alarm sounds. Again, the word alarm is a clue because they interrupt sleep and sleep is how we get well. Sadly, many people in hospitals working there hear those alarms so often that they actually ignore them. There's a thing called alarm fatigue in hospitals, I have absolutely no doubt that the noise level in hospitals is reducing our ability to heal, increasing stays, and making the whole process less effective. Positive sound, on the other hand, has been shown to be able to accelerate healing.

It's not a surprise, then that the number one complaint in American hospitals is noise. It's not the food. It's not the care. It's not the treatment. It's noise. It's a really major problem.

Also, if you look at hotels and the hospitality industry, what's the number one complaint there? Oh, it's noise. According to this huge survey of 2.5 million guests reviews. noise is the single biggest thing that people complain about. You may have had the experience of staying in a hotel where you might be next to the elevator and there's a party full of people at 2am who come out no He's really joking and laughing and wake you up, or people leaving their room at 530 in the morning, again, clunking down and talking in the corridor. This the noise attenuation of hotel doors very often is very poor.

And that's an issue because if you can hear them outside, they can hear you inside as well. Privacy is therefore very compromised. Not surprising noise is an issue there. Also, I'm constantly surprised by environments like hotel lobbies. And bars where people are trying to do one of two things. It's either talk to each other or work.

And yet so many of them are playing pounding dance music, which makes both of those two things extremely difficult. Again, just an auditory environment, which is not fit for purpose. And let's move on to the one that we probably all spend a lot of time in the office. What's the number one complaint in modern offices? It's noise. Not surprising because we have open plan the entire world there's something like 6 billion square feet of open plan.

Office now in the world, which very often is poorly designed. Now I'm not anti Open Office per se, but very often Open Office is very badly done. And it allows for things to affect people's concentration and well being and their effectiveness enormously Not to mention, as I've said, their health, other people's conversation. Unwanted conversation is the number one distractor. As I said, you have no knowledge you can't ignore. You can't do anything other than decode, and it's taking up bandwidth you need to use for your work.

Telephones ringing are they are another alarm sound. Ringing phones are designed to jolt you into action. And when somebody else's phone is ringing and you can't answer it, it's distracting. It's like a baby crying you want to do something about it, but you can't. So that is an extremely distracting sound as well. Having no control over sound causes us to be more distracted and irregular sounds are particularly distracting.

If it's a constant noise, you can habituate to it. Not that it's good for you, you know, you may know the feeling of the air conditioning going off at 6pm. And everybody's shoulders go down three inches and everybody goes, Oh, you haven't even noticed the sound all day. But it's been there and gently stressing you through the whole day, even though your brain has been going, I'm not listening to that. I'm still not listening to that. Your brain is pretty good at habituating to sounds, but they do have effect on you nevertheless.

Now these kind of distracting or unpleasant sounds cause three things they they make people annoyed. They distract people, and they create physical, physiological stress, mental stress as well. This has been measured with blood tests and skin tests. And the stress hormones are clearly elevated in noisy offices. result, job satisfaction down, job effectiveness down and cost to the company, which is cramming all these people into an open plan space and thinking Once more effective, well it may be cheaper, but it's not more effective. Now if you have any ability to design spaces, I want to give you the four building blocks to designing good sound in a space.

You can apply these to your house just as much as you can apply them to an open plan office. And they are acoustics. The building block the basis of the whole thing, it's very hard to make a good sound in a room with poor acoustics. Unfortunately, modern architects are besotted with hard surfaces, stone, glass, metal, these kind of surfaces which reflect sound back into the space and make everywhere loud. We need soft surfaces in order to ameliorate that. And there are some wonderful acoustic treatments which can now be brought in even if you have to have an office with trendy exposed ceilings.

You can have things floating from the ceiling, suspended there soaking up sound and making the space much more pleasant to be and they can look back anything, any color. You can even print on to them now. They can be tremendous design features. You can put acoustics on walls and print on them so they become graphic panels. So there's no excuse now, they can look fantastic as well as helping to make the space effective and healthy. Then once you've done the acoustics, you need to look at noise sources.

Now obviously, people are the main noise source and we don't want to stop that we can't have an empty space. So people are inevitable, and we need to encourage people's interactions. However, there are plenty of noise sources that are not particularly nice banging doors, squeaking things, electromechanical noise from machinery and so forth. Very often. Those have been just casually put there. One particular bugbear of mine is coffee machines in restaurants we seem to have to see and hear the coffee being made in order to trust that it's being made properly.

But the theater of coffee is very loud. And I don't have to tell you that having a quiet cup of coffee is pretty difficult these days because you have to hear the baristas grinding, banging and so forth. So, noise sources, let's think carefully about them. Are they appropriate? Do we need to have them in this space? Or could we put them somewhere quieter?

And then if you're going to have sound in any space, you need to have an effective sound system to deliver it. This is the biggest problem in shops who put in cheap sound systems very often it gets value engineered out of the process. Do we really have to have hundred dollar loudspeakers? Surely we can have something that more like $5 loudspeakers? Well, you can, and they sound rubbish. And what you do is then play distorted tinny music into a shop which has a bad effect on people makes them leave and you lose sales.

So that kind of process is very unfortunate. If you're going to have sound in a space, make sure the system represents you, the organization, the brand, whatever it is effectively and if you're a quality organization, make sure you have a quality system and finally content. Now as I've said my company the sound agency is very excited to be putting now biophilic content into office spaces to improve the well being and the concentration levels there. That's one example we've put lots of sound into large spaces like malls and airports to make them more pleasant. It has to be carefully designed very often we're removing mindless music, music is being smeared all over the world. Now, I love music.

I am a musician. It's not always the most appropriate background sound. And unfortunately, it is a kind of default knee jerk reaction in many spaces. So let's think carefully about the content and you can do this in your house. If you go around in each room, listen to the acoustics, the noise sources that might be there. If you've got sound, is the sound system good enough.

And what content are you putting in you can put content into your room so you might want a little system, a little Bluetooth speaker or something which can play you the sound of gentle surf to love you to sleep. That is such a good idea, or having an alarm sound which comes on in the morning maybe birdsong much more natural. I'm a big fan of biophilic sound. So, I hope you found that tour of the interrelation between speaking and listening. Interesting. And the way in which noise and context are absolutely critical.

Content has to come first delivery is just behind it. And if you can master both those two things, and remember, you speak into a listening, then you will be a powerful speaker.