05 December, 2012

Building in Sound

Biamp Systems_BuildingInSound_WP_Dec2012.pdf Download this file

I'm thrilled to have helped my friends at Biamp Systems create a really important white paper about how noise in the modern world affects us all. It's called Building in Sound and I have a pdf, hot of the metaphorical press, which I'm attaching to this blog so that you can download your own copy.

This document took months to produce, involving an exhaustive review of literature going back some 40 years, and its intention is to enrol as many people as possible in the message that sound must be carefully considered in the design process, whether for a building or an environment – a very similar message to my recent TED talk on why architects need to start designing with their ears. There is no time to lose in getting this message across to architects, planners, government, and those commissioning buildings: we are currently creating schools, hospitals, offices and urban spaces that are simply not fit for purpose, and every one of these is just another problem to be solved, involving more expense at a time when money is tight. It's so much easier and cheaper to design in good acoustics, low noise and good sound systems at the start – and yet sound is rarely considered an important element of design, and even if it has been included, so often acoustics and sound systems are the first things to get 'value engineered' out of the project. This can all happen because nobody on the team understands the massive effect these seemingly minor decisions will have on the people living, working or occupying that space for years to come. Maybe it's just because sound is invisible… so we need to start shouting about it.

I hope this white paper is another important brick in the wall of increasing sound awareness, conscious listening and designing with sound. Well done to Biamp for sponsoring it. Please do read it and then use it wherever you can to pass the message on. Sound matters!

Posted via email from Julian Treasure's posterous

The future of listening

11 November, 2012

Sound workers unite!

I have in the last week presented to the Mozart & Science 2012 conference for music therapists, and to the Autumn conference of the UK Institute of Acoustics. My message to both was essentially that of my latest TED talk: that we need to start designing our built environments with our ears. The experience of meeting two such aligned and yet very different groups made me reflect on the effects of specialisation. As we focus and specialise, we can gain great depth in our own area, but we can also lose sight of the bigger picture.

The early scientists were polymaths, happy to leap from geology to cosmology, political philosophy or chemistry and then back again without a second thought. Today even the relatively small community of sound workers is divided into many specialisations, and very few of them are talking to one another. I believe there are great gains available if musicians, composers, sound designers, sound and music therapists, sonic artists, musicologists, music psychologists, aural ecologists, audio branding practitioners, audiologists, ENT specialists, acousticians, sound engineers, pro-AV and h-fi specialists and installers all start to communicate. Without doubt, there is deep wisdom and experience locked into all of these groups, but it is not being cross-fertlised at the moment.

Based on my experience this week, even groups as disparate as acousticians and music therapists care about very much the same things: the effects of sound and vibration on health, productivity and behaviour. Across all of the sound worker groups, there is a shared passion for sound: to know it fully and to better understand its relationship with human beings. We have so much to learn from one another, and through communication with one another we can enhance our perspective and perhaps transform the whole context for our own work. There are far more similarities than differences between us: we are all on the same road, so why not join hands and walk it together?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a single central website that connects us all? This could be a place where papers, thoughts and work can be posted, where people and organisations can find one another, and where resources can be linked to for the common good. The question is, who has the time and resources to create such a site? Maybe this forum can start this conversation and then we can see where it goes.

Even more important than sharing, we need to start speaking with one voice. We all care deeply about the sound of the world, but because most of its population are unconscious about sound’s effects on them, governments pay almost no attention to the subject. And so we have at best a little noise mapping and no action. We have a few low-level regulations, rarely enforced, about sound in buildings – even those as crucial as schools and hospitals – and our architects and designers care only about visual appearance, forgetting about aural experience. The effects of this institutional deafness are devastating.

If we sound workers are going to change this and get governments to start thinking about positive sound design rather than (at best) reactive noise control policy, we need to become a powerful lobby with a single message: sound matters and the costs of ignoring it are enormous.

The response to my TED talks on sound has been overwhelming, which proves to me that there is a great latent desire to reconnect with sound, to understand its effects and to listen more consciously to our environment and to one another. I believe we sound workers have a responsibility to awaken that desire. If we can do that, we will truly make the world a better place for generations to come.

Posted via email from Julian Treasure's posterous

14 May, 2012

The Sound Agency seeks an MD elect

With rapid growth so far this year, it’s time for The Sound Agency to move to the next level. We are looking for a Managing Director elect to take us there. Our market is growing fast, our reputation is second to none, our products and services are innovative and effective, and our clients are a glittering blue chip list. We now need to scale up. This means winning lots of business and laying on the resources to handle it, both in the UK and globally.

Working with our brilliant business coach at Shirlaws, we’ve created a position description. It describes the job in some detail. We are open on the person who will be right for this position, but here are some likely aspects… s/he will probably be all, or at least most, of the following:

  • entrepreneurial, in other words comfortable with high risk and high reward, as we are still small and there are few guarantees: this is not a safe corporate job, which is why the remuneration will be performance-based and will include the possibility of a substantial shareholding
  • interested primarily in ownership and control and building to a trade sale, as opposed to short term income and security
  • bringing experience of channel, franchise and international operations
  • a fine salesperson and motivator
  • oriented toward planning, doing and completing rather than strategising
  • excellent at setting and achieving targets, personally and in a team
  • passionate about sound, or at least music
  • experienced in high level contact with blue chip brands, ideally in a marketing-related conversation.

If this is your first contact with us, have a wander through our website and Google our founder, Julian Treasure and his TED talks for more background. If after looking at the position description you’d like to throw your hat in the ring, call Tracey Hayes on 0845 500 2511 or email tracey.hayes@thesoundagency.com.

Posted via email from Julian Treasure's posterous

The Sound Agency is seeking an MD elect!

With rapid growth so far this year, it’s time for The Sound Agency to move to the next level. We are looking for a Managing Director elect to take us there. Our market is growing fast, our reputation is second to none, our products and services are innovative and effective, and our clients are a glittering blue chip list. We now need to scale up. This means winning lots of business and laying on the resources to handle it, both in the UK and globally.

Working with our brilliant business coach at Shirlaws, we’ve created a position description. It describes the job in some detail. We are open on the person who will be right for this position, but here are some likely aspects… s/he will probably be all, or at least most, of the following:

  • entrepreneurial, in other words comfortable with high risk and high reward, as we are still small and there are few guarantees: this is not a safe corporate job, which is why the remuneration will be performance-based and will include the possibility of a substantial shareholding
  • interested primarily in ownership and control and building to a trade sale, as opposed to short term income and security
  • bringing experience of channel, franchise and international operations
  • a fine salesperson and motivator
  • oriented toward planning, doing and completing rather than strategising
  • excellent at setting and achieving targets, personally and in a team
  • passionate about sound, or at least music
  • experienced in high level contact with blue chip brands, ideally in a marketing-related conversation.

If this is your first contact with us, have a wander through our website and Google our founder, Julian Treasure and his TED talks for more background. If after looking at the position description you’d like to throw your hat in the ring, call Tracey Hayes on 0845 500 2511 or email tracey.hayes@thesoundagency.com.

Posted via email from Julian Treasure's posterous

02 March, 2012

Don’t define people by their maddest edges: Jon Ronson at TED2012

It was a joy working with Jon Ronson and Evan Grant on Jon's talk at TED2012 on psychopaths. I was cueing all the sound, and Even the visuals. Sound design was by the brilliant Paul Weir, with creative direction (and some extra tweaks) by me. The talk was a stunning success, with a standing ovation and some wonderful comments from the stellar TED audience, which included names like Al Gore, Matt Groening, Phillipe Starck and David Byrne (who loved the talk). It will be going up on the TED.com website in due course (not a simple editing job this one!) but for now here's the official TED blog on the talk.

Don’t define people by their maddest edges: Jon Ronson at TED2012

05 February, 2012

Soundscape Design 101

Most people, and most organisations, underestimate the importance of sound. It’s time for us all to take responsibility for the sound we make, and the sound we surround ourselves with.

In our daily lives we rarely encounter one sound in isolation; usually there are multiple sounds firing off all around us. The entirety of the sound in any one location is a soundscape. The word was coined by Canadian sound author and composer R. Murray Schafer. His concept of a soundscape was essentially an auditory landscape, almost exclusively applied to outdoor locations, and has been used by a thriving aural ecology movement ever since in their campaign against encroaching urban noise and their passionate efforts to record disappearing soundscapes.

I hope that in the future there will be more and more recording and archiving of some of the soundscapes we’re going to lose. The internet will make it possible for virtual soundscape museums to be set up, and the effort will be extremely valuable for generations to come. Each great city needs a soundscape archive because it’s usually not until something has disappeared that we miss it. In London, some of the classic sounds my parents knew well have disappeared: examples include the sound of tugboat whistles on the Thames, rag-and-bone men calling from their horse-drawn carts and the sound of steam trains in the great metropolitan termini. Characteristic London sounds I know so well, like “Mind the gap” on the tube or the sound of black cabs, will not last forever. Soundscapes can be preserved now, so we can leave a valuable record for future generations.

More importantly, we can get active in designing soundscapes for positive effect. To do this it’s useful to distinguish background sound from foreground sound. This is not a hard and fast rule, but the concept is a helpful starting point. Background sound (or ambient sound) tends to be quieter, easier to ignore, more continuous, less variable, broader in spectrum; foreground sound tends to be louder, more intrusive, composed of recognisable events, changeable, located in particular frequencies. For example, in a restaurant the background sound might comprise other patrons talking, the clatter of cutlery and low-level background music; the foreground sound might be our companion or a waiter speaking to us. In a supermarket, background sound might include people talking, beeping tills, trolley noise; foreground sound might be a staff announcement or a baby screaming right next to us. In some soundscapes the background effectively becomes the foreground: conversation is not the primary function in a nightclub or at a football match.

When we are designing soundscapes at The Sound Agency we consider what foreground sound people will be trying to focus on, and what background will be most conducive to that happening. For commercial spaces our aim is to create a soundscape that’s useful, appropriate and effective given the nature of the space, its function, the people in it and the brand or values behind it. The soundscape must also be congruent with the messages being received through all the other senses.

We can all do this in our private lives too. Listen to every room you spend time in, and ask: what sound could support me in doing what I want to do here? Whether it’s working, relaxing, sleeping or socialising, you can consciously design a soundscape that will work with you rather than against you. Just as you choose the colours of your walls and the furniture, you can choose your soundscape.

Every space has a soundscape, and I believe that every soundscape should be designed. The benefits will be enhanced, health, productivity and quality of life for everyone.

Posted via email from Julian Treasure's posterous

05 January, 2012

Music is not a veneer!

A survey reported recently in the UK Daily Mail (Nov 4) suggested that 50% of shoppers leave stores because of the background music playing. This finding is a welcome antidote to a lot of often poorly-designed research suggesting that music is universally beneficial and so should be deployed absolutely everywhere. That is obviously not true, and yet the thesis sadly seems to have taken root in the minds of many retailers. I suspect that the explosion of mindless music in public places is fuelled less by retailers' desire to improve the shopping environment than by the music industry's desperate search for new revenue streams. With sales of 'product' collapsing, the music industry is left with just two revenue streams that are still growing: live shows, and royalties from public performance of recorded music. The moguls of music (and their acolytes in the royalty collection agencies) have seized onto background music with the desperate grasp of a drowning man on a piece of wreckage. It seems that their dearest wish is to veneer with music every public space in the world – shops, malls, restaurants, cafés, outdoor spaces, buses, taxis, stations, airports, gyms, community buildings. And so they sponsor one-eyed research to 'prove' that we all love music everywhere.

Veneering the world with music is wrong, for two reasons.

1: It's the wrong direction for the music industry
Omnipresent piped music is not the answer to the music industry's woes. The future of music lies in a subtler and infinitely more fruitful pursuit: monetising the artist/fan relationship. Tomorrow's savvy artist will offer a range of opportunities to engage (both virtual and physical), and the fans will choose the level that's right for them, from a free download of a single track to VIP club membership with privileges at gigs and even personal meetings. This type of thinking is already being explored by artists like Björk, Imogen Heap and Thomas Dolby. In a world where peer sharing is normal behaviour, the basic music track has become a promotional tool, a sweetener to entice us into the real transaction space where we will happily pay premium prices (repeatedly) for exclusive content, added value and a sense of connection. This is not a commodity sell any more: it's much closer to a membership model.

Imogen Heap is a great example. Her huge Twitter following have been with her blow by blow during the creation of the tracks on her new album, as she tweets her progress in real time, night by night. Now, as each track is released, this ready-made market of hundreds of thousands of fans can and do choose between buying the basic track from a few pence (prices vary for different quality options based on how much compression you want to accept) or the deluxe package, which includes a video, a 'making of' video or voice commentary, and possibly an app as well. There's a web site offering still further levels of engagement – for example an online mixer where aspiring remix gurus can save their own interpretations and enter them in a competition.

Thomas Dolby shows another, equally inventive, approach. His new album A Map Of The Floating City is symbiotically linked with an online role-playing game called the Floating City, where prizes (including music tracks) get unlocked as his army of committed fans (many of them members of his online community the Flat Earth Society) play the game, trading with and meeting each other along the way. The bulletin boards of the FES are highly active, so Dolby needs little in the way of external marketing for tours, appearances and music releases.

Björk's Biophilia project explores still more ways to add layers of richness and value to music. Each track on the album is transformed into a separate app for iPad and iPhone, with the full set of 10 heavily discounted. The apps themselves combine stunning visuals with game interaction, score visualisations and even an introduction by David Attenborough. Music becomes just one element of a rich, engaging experience that engages touch, sight and sound in an exploration of nature, music and technology.
Note, in most of this there is no record company required. The traditional record company roles have been disintermediated. Here's how...
  • Production – modern software makes it possible to record, produce and master great-sounding music without needing months in expensive recording studios, so no massive advance is required these days.
  • Marketing – with effective use of social media, the fans will have a direct relationship with the artist so little or no advertising is needed to reach them; smart viral and guerrilla messaging can ensure that many more get to hear about releases, and if the music is worth its salt, word of mouth and peer review on sites like Amazon will do the rest. The bigger artists will employ their own specialist agencies to handle this, along with their web presences, especially Facebook.
  • Packaging – artists are directly employing freelance designers, photographers and art directors to produce the look and feel they want, without input from record company management.
  • Manufacturing – digital music makes producing a physical product a minority activity; where CD, USB or vinyl is still needed, there are plenty of eager manufacturers who will handle the whole process, saving the artist massive sums if they are paid directly.
  • Distribution – the main transformative factor in this whole new world is that buyers come to the artist and buy digitally. There is no distribution cost for artists like Imogen Heap. If artists choose to use other channels (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon) then the cost of distribution is deducted at sale and there is still a positive cash flow.
Record companies should give up trying to hold onto these traditional functions, apart from at the most commercial, plastic end of the market, where malleable, naive X Factor acts can still be assembled, packaged, managed and sold at a large profit. The smart operators will reinvent themselves as world class experts in financial management, sponsorship negotiation, tour and event management, branding, merchandising and online transaction management. Tomorrow's music company will be more like a branding agency than a traditional record company. Instead of owning the art (and the artist), it will facilitate, support and optimise, employing smart people to represent the artist and build and exploit his/her/their brand.

The band/brand space is particularly significant in this new world. I predict that consumer brands are going to be the new patrons of music. Centuries ago, the aristocracy and the church sponsored music for their own reasons. In just the same way, household name brands will commission, sponsor and have rights to music in the future. We have already seen tour sponsorship and commissioning of tracks for TV commercials; this is just the beginning.

So background music is not the future of music. In fact it's quite the opposite: by relegating music to the status of wallpaper it devalues the art and undermines our sacred relationship with something that is an essential part of being human. (There is no human culture without music, and there never has been.) Let's not desensitise ourselves to the point where we lose our love for it.

2: This is pollution, not decoration
Not only is mindless background music bad for music, it's bad for business too.

This latest survey mirrors an NOP poll sponsored in 1998 by the UK's RNID (now renamed Action on Hearing Loss), which found that roughly one third of people liked public background music, one third didn't care and one third hated it. Upsetting one third of your customers is a serious decision to take. The research that purports to show that we all love music everywhere is usually sponsored by the record companies or the licensing agencies, who have an obvious agenda, and much of it is methodologically unsound. In my experience, asking people what they think of music in a shop (or even worse, whether they like it) is useless. The people who hate music won't be in there – they will have gone somewhere else, so the sample is self-selecting and biassed to start with. Then there's the fact that most people are unconscious of most background music until asked one of these questions, at which moment they start to listen consciously and crystallise an opinion instantly, based on the track currently playing. Much more interesting than what people say is what they do. Do they leave the store sooner, or stay longer? Do they feel more or less stressed in the aural environment? Do they spend more or less money? Do they feel more or less affinity with the brand or the place? These questions can only be answered by testing different sound conditions and measuring these quantities or feelings without mentioning the sound at all. One survey I know of found three in five people turning around at the door of a shop with loud music and not entering at all. Researching those inside the shop would never have revealed this kind of damage.

I suspect that the NOP survey is a fair picture of the real situation. And it shouldn't surprise us, for four reasons.

First, there is a basic conflict of interest at work. Almost all music is made to be listened to, not ignored. Intention is important with sound, so when this music is used as aural wallpaper there is a battle between the music's intention (to be listened to) and the intention of most of the people being exposed to it (shopping, talking, thinking and so on). Music is a very dense sound: it calls our attention to it, so it hinders cognition. We all know the feeling of rising stress when we try to think or talk with loud music playing. Music is simply not fit for purpose as background sound – with the sole exception of ambient music, in its original conception by Brian Eno as music that's specifically designed not to be listened to. The visual equivalent of most current background music would be covering every inch of the walls in reproduction art. Nobody does that because it would be distracting, overwhelming and far too rich; white walls are generally preferred because we don't have to pay them any attention. Exactly the same holds true for sound: it's just that we've become so used to suppressing our awareness of noise that we don't notice the craziness of wallpapering all our environments with music.

Second, most retail music is fast-paced pop, which is simply inappropriate for many stores. If you want to speed people up and reduce dwell time, play fast music. I can absolutely understand fast music in McDonald's – but not in Swarovski, Zara or O2 stores. Anyone selling high value or complex goods or services should be in the business of slowing people down and relaxing them, not speeding them up and generating stress hormones.
Third, music produces strong emotional responses through powerful associations. Two very similar people can have diametrically opposed reactions to a track simply because of its associations for them personally, and this is impossible to predict. Playing popular music is therefore liable to create potent and unpredictable responses, which is not very wise.

Finally, and related to the last point, most retail music is anodyne. Music programmers have to avoid the aural equivalent of over-strong flavours, not to mention any hint of sex, politics, violence or vulgarity (though profanity often slips through when urban music is not carefully listened to) – so we tend to end up with wall-to-wall Abba or formula lounge music. Branded spaces should sound, as well as look, unique: you should be able to close your eyes and know where you are. If music is the same from shop to shop, it becomes meaningless to have it there at all. By contrast, strong music choices can be very effective. Abercrombie & Fitch use their loud and tightly-slected music as a filter, and it works very well: they don't want me in there and I don't want me in there either! I dart in to pay for my daughter's choices when she's ready. 
While carefully chosen music for niche audiences can be very productive, mindless music for all is pollution, not decoration. We all need to demand more from our retailers, transport operators and leisure facilities. If the sound is upsetting you, complain!

Fortunately there are two great alternatives to music in public spaces. Silence can be golden, especially if acoustics are well designed so that the space feels lovely to be in. In the pantheon of precious commodities for the 21st century, peace may well be the new time. Spaces that offer peace and quiet will, I suspect, do very well. Where there is a need for aural wallpaper, then generative sound is an exciting new option. Played live by computer, always evolving, relatively free of associations and most of all designed to be ignored, this is the sonic equivalent of patterned wallpaper. It can incorporate natural sounds like birdsong or water to create ambiances of understated beauty, changing the mood and effect of a space dramatically.

Reclaiming music – and boosting business with sound
So let's not veneer the world with music. Let's honour it and listen to it, as it wants us to... and instead of abusing music let's design sound in our public spaces just as carefully as we design shape, colour and lighting. Here are my four golden rules for creating commercial or public sound:

1 make it congruent with your brand or the values of the organisation (for example, define and use consistently a brand voice)

2 make it appropriate for the situation (for example public announcements must be intelligible; sound on the telephone must work with very restricted frequency response)

3 make sure it adds some real value (and remember, silence is a sound, and can add great value just by giving people a rest from noise)

4 test and test again, using continual research that measures how people feel and what they do in different soundscapes, without asking them what they think of the sound itself.

When you've got all that right, there's one more challenge. If you're going to create and play well-designed sound, don't fall at the last hurdle and skimp on the quality of your sound system. This is not a thing to be specified by quantity surveyors or IT/technical departments: you need to make sure that someone with good ears and a passion for your brand is involved.
Last and most important of all, train your staff to listen. This will pay dividends in every aspect of your business, from sales to customer care and team leadership. Even if you only get them to spend six minutes watching my TED talk on listening that would be a great start. Better still, make training in conscious listening skills a part of your induction, and of your ongoing training programme. The returns will be phenomenal, and we'll take one more step towards a listening world.