Let's have a look then at the power of sound. Most of the sound around this is pretty unpleasant Actually, it's accidental. It's largely the just a byproduct of stuff happening. And we stand on street corners bellowing over noise like this, and pretending that it doesn't exist. It does. And our habit of pretending it doesn't causes us to suppress our consciousness of sound, which is a shame.

Let me take you right back to the beginning of your relationship with sound. This was the first thing you've ever heard. You're hearing this roughly 12 weeks after conception. At that stage, you had no ears developed, but you were hearing with every cell in your body. And you're still doing that. Right now.

We all do that actually. The best example of this would be the famous percussionist named Evelyn Glennie whom I've had the honor of meeting, amazing woman listens with every cell in her body because she is profoundly Death. And yet she manages to play around the world with symphony orchestras. And be listening. She learned as a child to listen with every cell in her body through a very enlightened teacher, and is able to play in that way. Now you do that now I'm doing that.

Now we're just not conscious, because we're so used to assuming our ears are the way we listen. Well, they are, of course, the main way we listen. However, we don't listen that carefully anymore. Most of us have a relationship with sound that's a little bit like this. I think you'll agree. And yet, even though we're unconscious of the sound around us most of the time, it affects us in four profound ways, which I'm going to share with you now.

Here's the first Sorry about that. And that's a shot of cortisol your fight or flight hormone. If your alarm clock at home sounds, anything like that, I do suggest that you change it. It's not very good for you to wake up to a threat sound like that. There's a reason it's called an alarm clock. So please change that sound changes your heart rate, your breathing, your hormone secretions, even your brainwaves sound is the primary warning that we have hearing is your primary warning sense.

So that kind of sound has an immediate physiological response. You don't have time to interpret it. This is going to the old part of the brain, the limbic system before it ever gets to your cortex to be interpreted. Oh, that's just my alarm clock. Your body has reacted that made you ready to fight or flee. Let me calm you down again.

With a sound. This is gentle surf. It's a very relaxing sound very good to use. If you ever have problems sleeping, I do suggest you try deploying this in your bedroom. It's a pretty similar rhythm To the breathing of a sleeping human being. It's also a sound we associate with being relaxed on a beach and other care in the world.

Beauty Gentle, beautiful scenes. So it's an extremely relaxing sound physiologically and it will calm you right down again. Second way sound affects you is psychologically, it changes our feelings. Now we all know music does that this piece of music is not designed to make you feel happy. It's a sad, melancholy piece of music. Music has enormous power to boost or to alter our feelings.

It's not the only sound that changes our feelings that my company the sound agency, we use birdsong a lot in various places. bird song makes most people feel secure and safe because we've learned over hundreds of thousands of years that when the birds are happily singing like this, things are normally okay. It's also by the way, nature's alarm clock and a very good sound to use. If you do want an alternative to that horrible bell. It tells you it's time to be awake. And yet it tells you you're safe so you're in a very good state of body relaxed mind.

Alert. It's extremely good sound for working to. And indeed, we're about to start deploying nature sound in offices around the world to improve the environment of open plan offices, which can sound pretty hideous. We'll come back to that in a moment. Because the third way sound affects you is cognitive. If you listen, you can't understand two people talking at the same time or in this case, one person talking twice.

You can't do it, can you you have bandwidth for about 1.6 human conversations nobody can take into conversations simultaneously. And that's an issue. If you have to work in an office that sounds like this. Particularly if you can overhear one conversation next to you. That is a real issue. Because you're programmed to decode language.

We have no elites. You may have noticed you can't shut it out unless you block it with headphones or some other deliberate action. And so if there's somebody behind you talking about their great night out last night, they're taking out one of your 1.6 and displacing the voice you need in your head as you're doing concentrated, thoughtful work like numbers or writing. I have many times been into the BBC, which is now a large open plan office in London. And the people there complain eternally about the difficulty of being a journalist in an open plan office like that, where people are behind you having a conversation that you're trying to write something on a deadline, it's extremely difficult. And actually, it's so difficult that productivity drops dramatically.

Now, there are many pieces of research showing the dramatic drop in productivity. This is the biggest one so I'm obviously going to show the biggest one because I do think this is a huge effect around the world of open plan offices. Now open plan is very For one thing, which is collaboration, but when you need to concentrate you need a different kind of office environment, which is more like a library where the rule is no talking here. Or for contemplation, you might need the more Zen space. And indeed for communication, that can be quite difficult in open plan as well. Because if I take a phone call in a quiet open plan office, I'm putting off everybody in the office who can all hear my conversation perfectly.

And I've got no privacy, or privacy, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on. That is a major issue. It's inhibiting for me, and it's off putting for everybody else. So again, I think we need to think carefully, some open plan offices are too loud, and they need to be quiet and down because it's actually dangerous for people's health to be in noisy environments day after day. Other open plan offices are very quiet, and that's an issue with privacy and distraction. And we need them to install some sound which again, I have We're about to start doing it the sound agency very excitingly, the fourth way sound affects all of us, is behavior really.

So ask yourself, Is this person going to drive at a steady 30 miles or 35 kilometres an hour? I don't think so. This kind of sound changes our behavior. Fundamentally, whatever your response to it might be, it's probably going to be different to if you're not listening to it. At the most simple level, we will move away from unpleasant sound if we can. So if I were to put this sound on I leave it for the remainder of this part of the course.

I think you take your headphones off or turn the video off and move away we we just don't like to be around sound like that. It's natural for us to move away. Sound affects our behavior in more subtle ways. However, not just moving away from bad sound, although unfortunately, as I've said before, a lot of have become so dead to sound that we won't do that. I have the experience many times of having been in Waterloo station on the Bakerloo line in London. And as the Bakerloo line, underground trains come into Waterloo, there's a curve and the wheels of the trains screech with an unbearable square, that's probably 110 120 decibels of piercing shriek and I look down the corridor, everybody's just standing there.

Me I've got my fingers in my ears because that sound is not good for you. It's hurting your hearing. And it's also physiologically putting you on edge, giving you all sorts of boosts of cortisol and noradrenaline, but most people don't do anything. So you know, they've gone dead even to that kind of sound. However, as I said, sound does change our behavior a great deal. Let me give you a tremendously interesting study that was done by some academics in 1997.

They did it in a supermarket. With two gondola ends, one showing French wine and one showing German wine. The visual displays were identical. And all they did was to alternate the music condition. So on day one we had a little bit of this a little bit of that which always makes people smile when I do this in audiences I don't know it must be very cheerful little piece of German music Pat. On the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by five bottles to one which may not be surprising does tend to sell more on the world market.

However, on the German music days, German wine outsold French wine by two bottles to one. Now that is a startling shift in human behavior. And it's one which is not about conscious appreciation. This isn't people coming in going, ah, German music playing therefore I should buy German wine doesn't work like that this was unconscious simply the music playing changed people's behavior that much. Now, if sound is changing your behavior that much, I think it's quite important to become more aware of that. So you're not getting influenced in ways that you wouldn't want, and perhaps using sound consciously in ways that you do want.

Retailers are just starting to understand this Now, of course, and it's important they do because bad sound in a shop is about as sensible as a bad smell in a shop, and it has a similar effect. Although many retailers haven't tweaked This, again, the sound agencies working with big shopping malls and major retailers around the world who do understand it's as important to design for the ears as it is for the eyes. Unfortunately, however, most of the world is designed for these architects are very obsessed with how things look and they don't really think very much about how things Sound. In America architects are trained for five years around that. And in most cases they spend in that five years a total of one day on sound. Well, that's not exceptional because we don't tend to focus on sound in our education systems do we hear the four ways we communicate reading, writing, speaking and listening?

Now, I've presented them here with equal weight, but that's not the way we teach them is it? It's a scandal if a child leaves school, unable to read or write, of course, but children leave school unable to speak effectively or listen consciously. Every single year, millions and millions of them. Actually, the way we teach and the way we treat these things in society is a lot more like this. Listening is a silent skill, very hard to teach, very hard to test. Unfortunately, I think in American schools speaking is tricky.

A little more seriously than in the UK. And I'm not sure how its treated in your country. But I think everywhere in the world, you would agree that there's an emphasis on reading and writing skills, and a de emphasis on the incredibly important skills of speaking and listening. Furthermore, I would say there's also an emphasis on the sending side. So the writing rather than the reading, the speaking rather than the listening, we prefer to send them to listen, a lot of the time in think of social media, we'll come back to these things. Now, this is unfortunate, actually speaking has been around a lot longer than writing has, in terms of the two communication channels.

We've been using complex language for anything up to 100,000 years. Writing was only invented 4000 years ago. Before that, the whole of human knowledge was handed down in oral tradition, which indeed is All true and certain areas Indian classical music, for example, you may not know this is entirely oral, there's no notes written at all. So you learn it by Sitting at the feet of your master, and listening to what they say and what they do and how they play. And then you memorize it. But there are very few fields where that's the case.

Now, in most cases, we write things down. Now, there are different benefits to each of these two things. Speaking, is tremendously powerful. Because it's so rich, it's got so much in it, you can hear the nuances as I speak, because I'm using my voice to give you different dimensions very different from if you just read these words, as interactive in conversation, synchronous, so you get a party going, you get two people responding to each other in real time. However, of course, writing has great benefits to you can publish it, apart from anything else and some of the huge social changes the world has seen have been a result of things being published and disseminated and changing millions of people's opinions, or perspectives. It's also asynchronous, which can be very useful.

If I want to send you an email and you're in a different time zone, I can send it in the middle of your night and you can respond the next day, that's all fine. I don't think you'd appreciate a phone call quite as much. However, we are losing contact a little bit with the speaking side of this, because of the writing side has become so dominant, you probably resonate with this picture. We all have so much inbound, I get hundreds of emails a day. And it's difficult not to feel overwhelmed with that kind of input. We are losing our listening.

We really are. And I think that's a major danger for society. Now, I wanted to give you this basis in the Paris sound so that you could start to understand it's really important to relate to sound in a more conscious way. And as we go through this course you're going to appreciate that listening underpins speaking. Speaking is just sound and listening is how we relate to sound. The better you listen, the better you understand the more conscious you are in your relationship with sound, the more powerfully you will be able to speak