Sound affects!

We experience sound from around 12 weeks after our conception, 24 hours a day, every day. Our ears are at work even while we sleep — they have no choice; we have no ear lids. But what we are hearing has changed greatly over the last 200 years: in the modern world, and particularly in cities, most of the sound around us is man-made and far from pleasant — and its quantity is increasing every year.

Look around you, wherever you are as you read this. Aside from any plants, the odds are that everything you see was carefully designed by someone: it is intentional, meant to look like that. Its shape, colour, texture, size — all are the result of conscious choices. It's hard to imagine making something without being concerned with all these qualities… but as you move through the rest of your day today, start to notice that almost nothing you hear has been designed by anyone.

The sound around us is mainly accidental: things make those noises just because that’s what they do. Road traffic, aeroplanes, trains, coffee machines, hums, buzzes, the acoustics of rooms — almost all the elements of the soundscape are unintentional, undesigned by-products of people and machines just doing what they do. It’s the exhaust gas of the modern world.

Not only is most urban sound accidental: much of it is unpleasant, inappropriate and counterproductive. This is partly because it’s undesigned, and partly because we pretend that it doesn’t exist, which means there’s no demand for anybody to take responsibility and put it right. There are no votes in peace and quiet. We’ve become increasingly unconscious about sound: we’re losing our listening.

Noise has been shown by the WHO to be producing massive negative effects on public health, which I will write about in a separate piece. Here I want to focus on the effects on business, which are less well mapped.

The simple truth is that most businesses are shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly with bad sound. This happens in hundreds of auditory interactions with you and me: the soundscape in a corporate reception area (often dominated by a TV screen showing bad news); the beeps, hums and crashes of a supermarket; the infuriating sound of badly-designed automated responses on the phone; the distracting noise in open-plan offices (which can reduce productivity by up to two thirds!); the intimidating noise of machinery like heating, air conditioning, cooling fans or chiller cabinets that should be almost silent, but so often are far from that; the sound of badly-chosen and/or badly-delivered on-hold or piped music; the lousy acoustics in restaurants where diners have to yell at one another from a foot away… add all of them together and you get the sound of billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet every day.

Most of this accidental and unpleasant sound happens because businesses are simply unconscious of their sound output. This is bizarre because they certainly care about people’s opinions. Each year, trillions of dollars are spent on how businesses look… and almost nothing at all on how they sound. It’s as if sound has no consequences — but that’s not true.

Sound affects us all in four powerful ways. Physiologically, it changes our hormone secretions, heart and breathing rates and even our brain waves. Psychologically it affects our mood — obvious in the case of music, but more subtle in other cases; for example, birdsong makes many people feel relaxed and secure because we’ve learned over millennia that when the birds are singing, we’re safe. Cognitively, sound affects our ability to think and process information. And behaviourally, we tend naturally (if not necessarily consciously) to move away from unpleasant sound, and to speed up or slow down as the sound around us entrains our pace.

Can we escape the negative effects of modern noise? When we were children we used to stick our fingers in our ears and hum in order not to hear what we didn’t like. To avoid the cacophony of modern living, many millions of people today adopt a cooler version of that strategy: mobile music. But headphone use brings its own dangers. One in eight American teenagers is already suffering from noise-induced hearing loss mainly as a result of excessive headphone use, and our social interaction is being dramatically altered as previously shared soundscapes get chopped up into millions of individual sound bubbles. Murray Schafer called this kind of dislocation from one’s immediate sonic environment ‘schizophonia’, and it’s a prevalent and in my opinion far from healthy modern phenomenon.

It’s not too late to reclaim an aesthetic sensibility for the sound we create. As individuals and as leaders of organizations we can regain our listening, and take responsibility for our personal and corporate soundscapes and their effect on our wellbeing and our relationships. To get you started, I offer you some exercises that you can use to develop your own conscious listening.

• Give your ears the gift of a few minutes of silence every day: it’s a precious commodity and it resets your listening.
• Practice distinguishing the separate sounds around you, as if they were channels on a mixing desk.
• Explore and relish even mundane sounds to discover the hidden choir or protect your wellbeing: a kettle or an engine can be beautiful if you pay attention, while unnoticed noises can damage your health and productivity.
• Change your listening filters. We all have them — culture, attitudes, beliefs, expectations, intentions — but most people are unaware of them and think they are simply listening to reality. Play with them; try listening from a different place.

Conscious listening is a great way to be more present, and it brings tremendous advantages for wellbeing, productivity and effectiveness in relationships at home and at work. There is no substitute for listening at home, and a leader who masters listening will inspire amazing levels of loyalty and commitment, as well as getting the most out of every person in their team.

And at an organizational level, the great brands achieve consistency between promise and experience, over time and in all the senses. It’s nothing short of irresponsible to ignore the way a brand is experienced in sound.

For individuals or for organizations, the benefits of taking responsibility for sound are enormous. Do it as a human being and you will be healthier, happier and more present in life. Do it as a business leader and you will gain sales, brand value and productivity; your customers will love you for it — and the world will be a better place.