Well onto the third exercise for improving your listening skills. This one I call savoring, like this fellow is with his cup of coffee, which I must admit I do enjoy myself. You can savor tastes, obviously, you're very aware of what you put into your mouth and you're very used to tasting in order to make sure it's good for you. And in order to enjoy beautiful tastes. Well, you can save a sound as well. Sound around you has all sorts of flavors, if you like.

And if you start thinking of it as tasting sound, it becomes a really good game. You can taste all sorts of sounds and this allows you to start deciding what's good for you taking responsibility for the sound around you. It does two important things. Firstly, it helps you to avoid unpleasant sounds That's not good for you. That would be like putting something bad in your mouth, you want to spit it out. And just in the same way, the sound around you that's doing you harm needs to be avoided, you can move away or you can change it.

The other thing that, savoring allows you to do is not to miss beautiful sounds. There are many, many sounds around us which are actually really rather interesting or dramatic or beautiful, and we simply pay no attention to them. I'll give you one example. If you put your ear close to your kettle, not the top bit with the steam coming out, but the bottom bit is a bit safer than you might hear something like this. Now, to me that's rather a dramatic and beautiful sound. It's got a story arc, it goes from one place to another place.

It's very rich. It has all sorts frequencies and dynamics in it. All sorts of textures as well. really fascinating. Now, you may not find that fascinating, but I'm sure there are things around you that perhaps you have ignored, taken for granted as sounds that are irrelevant. We do that all the time.

And yet if you pay attention, there's a hidden choir in so much of what we hear. I'll tell you one experience I had which really brought this home to me. I did a workshop some years ago with the brilliant overtone, chant expert David hikes. And if you haven't ever heard his amazing first CD, which is called hearing solar wind, I do recommend you get that and have a listen to it. It is extraordinary. overtone singing, which in this particular tradition comes from Mongolia from the tuvan tradition involves changing the shape of your mouth to create a second tone over what your voice is singing.

You create a second tone by controlling harmonics. Now every sound has harmonics, there's a fundamental. And then there are lots and lots of harmonics above. That's really how we distinguish, say one person's voice from another or how you can tell the difference between a trumpet playing a C, and a flute, or a violin playing a C, same fundamental tone, but very different harmonics, which give color to the sound. After doing this workshop for a couple of days with David hikes, my hearing changed. I got into the car to go home on the second evening, turned on the engine, and suddenly I heard all the harmonics of the car engine.

It was like suddenly seeing a rainbow, extraordinary experience. Sadly, it faded, I would have to have kept that practice going and that's so difficult to do in this busy world. So for me, that was a deep and powerful experience one which I intend to revisit in the future. Now you won't necessarily hear all the harmonics in every sound, what you can do is train your ear to listen more acutely and appreciate sounds for good, or for ill. So it's hearing the hidden choir. And I'd like to give you this exercise in savoring the first have to actually taste the soundscape of each of your rooms.

So imagine you're doing a tasting, go into a room with your eyes closed and listen carefully and taste the sound. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? What are the components? Is there anything interesting in there or anything you'd like to remove? So just take notes, after you've done the tasting of what you might want to change because we don't think necessarily about designing with our ears, in our homes or in our offices.

If you want some tips about sounds that are good for you. Well, here are three. See if you can guess what w wb stands for. I'm sure you got there before the end, wind, water and birds not violent versions of those. I'm not talking about Arctic gales or crashing huge storm waves, or even the unpleasant coining of corvids like crows. I'm talking about the more pleasant versions of these gentle windy leaves or corn, beautiful water, the babbling brook or gentle surf, and lovely birdsong.

These sounds have been around on this planet for a lot longer than we have two of them. What my friend Bernie Kraus would call g often he the sounds of the planet, one of them by often either sounds of animals, and instantly our sound he calls anthropology which is unfortunately, largely negative sound. Not all of it of course, we do make some very beautiful sounds as human beings, so on just suggesting that those might be happy and healthy sounds for you, but you may have other ones you might hate those sounds and you might find huge comfort and nourishment in different sounds altogether maybe particular kinds of music or voices or I don't know, it could be anything. So why don't you have a think as your second savoring exercise, think about what are your happy and healthy, healthy sounds? And how could you get more of them into your life that might involve getting recordings of them playing those things in your house, so they don't have to be things that you encounter just very occasionally, savoring a very good exercise.