Sound Business

Music is not a veneer!

2012-01-05T12:30:00.001Z

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.

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Great news about creative skills

2011-11-25T15:15:00.001Z

Great news about creative skills (mp3)

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White Night Brighton Saturday Oct 29

2011-10-27T15:01:00.001+01:00

Marwoods FINAL.pdf Download this file

I'm excited to be part of the amazing White Night event, which lights up the streets of Brighton all night this coming Saturday, partly to acknowledge the Autumn Equinox, when the clocks go back and we get an extra hour to enjoy the hundreds of events… and partly just to connect and be fascinated by a wealth of happenings, performances, installations and (in my case) café talks. There's a parallel event in Amiens, and they share a strong theme around sound, which is why I'll be there. My talk is about the future of sound and listening. Come along to Marwoods café at 2230 if you'd like to learn how to transform your listening and just possibly to change your reality.

Check out White Night here. And here is a flyer for the Marwoods café talks. See you there!

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Felix Zenger, beatboxer extraordinaire

2011-10-06T13:32:00.001+01:00

Felix Zenger, beatboxer extraordinaire (mp3)

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Teaching listening

2011-08-25T08:30:00.000+01:00

More suggestions on practical exercises to teach listening skills are in a nice blog post from Teacher's Tonic.

I am in the process of investigating the best way to set up a web resource for educators to share with each ideas, experiences and suggestions so that we can establish a body of evidence and some best practice guidelines. At the moment we're thinking a Google Group. I am trying to capture email addresses for all the educators who are contacting me through my blog, email, Google+, Facebook, Twitter... quite a task but it will be well worth it! Email me at julian.treasure@thesoundagency.com if you'd like to be involved.

Listening games

2011-08-02T16:59:00.001+01:00

Listening Games.pdf Download this file

Jazz musician and teacher Huw Lloyd has sent me this set of fun listening games taken from the world of improv theatre. He uses them to help musicians listen better, but we can probably all use them! I think some of these would nicely leaven the rather more serious listening exercises I have already posted here.

Keep 'em coming!

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Teaching listening in schools

2011-08-01T08:49:00.001+01:00

Following my TED talk on conscious listening and why it should be taught in schools, I've had enquiries from educators about how this can be done. Here are some practical suggestions. There are many more ideas and I would love to hear what people all over the world come up with. I plan to start a new web resource for listing in schools, probably a blog where people can post their experiences and ideas.

Silence
Help them to experience this possibly for the first time in their lives. Teach about it (take a look at my blog on silence for some ideas) and then work up from short shared silences - maybe one minute to start with - to longer ones. This will be very precious for them, but also very challenging. Ask them to write or share their experience of these silences, and what silence means in their lives.

Mixer
Take them to rich aural environments (start inside the school) and have them pair and log all the sound sources they hear. If you have the resources, let them experiment with multichannel sound.

Savouring
Give them a multi-day project to notice sounds and bring their three favourites in to class to share. If you have the resources (eg own a Zoom H2 digital recorder or similar) do this one small group at a time and have them record the sounds to play to all. You could do the same with sounds they dislike.

Listening positions
The most powerful of all. Pair them up and have A say what they had for breakfast while B listens from different positions (for example 1 I'm bored; 2 I want to be friends with this person; 3 I'm in a hurry; 4 what can I learn from this - please make up your own also). Have the As share their experiences at the end, then the Bs. Swap and repeat. If they get the principle that you can change reality by listening from a different place, that will be a great gift.

RASA (receive, appreciate, summarise, ask)
Practice each element by pairing up again and have listeners turn each element off and on while listening and then both people share their experience. Have them share about their general experience of being listened to at home, in school and elsewhere (especially by adults), and how it affects their own listening to others.

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Conscious listening

2011-07-30T10:53:00.001+01:00

My short TED talk on conscious listening went up on the TED website on Friday July 29 – one of the first from TEDGlobal in Edinburgh, and my third talk on ted.com. I'm honoured, and the reaction to this talk has been wonderful already, as I write just a day later. Views on TED's site are at around 70,000 in just 24 hours (which means double that on the web as a whole) and I have had a lot of great connections from teachers, psychologists, academics and businesspeople who are going to use the five exercises and support the vision of teaching listening in schools.

Here's the talk. Please take a look (and a listen) and pass it on if it resonates with you. The practice of conscious listening will make a real difference in the world.

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_5_ways_to_listen_better.html

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The Four Golden Rules of Sound

2011-07-27T10:22:00.001+01:00

Whenever sound is deployed in a commercial space, I recommend that it should always be created in accordance with the following four Golden Rules of commercial sound.

1. Make it optional
The backlash against piped music (with consumer groups like PipeDown to the fore) is partly fuelled by the resentment that arises from being given no choice. Research shows that people’s irritation with noise increases dramatically when they have no control over the sound source. It follows that we must try to give people a choice about any sound we inflict on them.

On the web, this means starting with sound off and offering it as an option (with an omnipresent control to toggle sound on/off). Obviously it's more difficult to make sound optional in a physical space – though not impossible. A range of rooms or spaces with different soundscapes is one practical solution, as educational establishments with silent reading rooms have long understood. If we can’t offer soundscape options that way, the next best thing is to target sound as carefully as possible, so that we upset the smallest number of people. For spaces with a very tight demographic and psychographic user profile, this is not too difficult. Some shops, bars, clubs and restaurants know exactly who their customers are and what they like; in many cases the sound (usually music) acts as a filter, attracting the ‘right’ people and warning the ‘wrong’ ones to go elsewhere because this is not for them. Buddha Bar and Abercrombie & Fitch are two good examples.

This approach can work in more generalist spaces if music is used as part of an overall zoning policy. For example in a large mall there might be zones for younger and older customers, and sound or music could be a form of signposting to help nudge people in the right direction.

The problems arise for generalist spaces that can’t or won’t operate this kind of zoning. One person’s signal is another person’s noise, and nowhere is this truer than with broadcast sound in public. Whatever you play in a mass-market space, you will upset someone. I strongly suggest two actions. First, err on the side of caution: it’s better to inject no sound that the wrong sound. There is nothing at all wrong with the sound of people shopping! Second, research carefully before you deploy. Do not assume that your customers will naturally love smooth jazz and r&b classics, because they just might loathe them. Use focus groups to ascertain attitudes, and create pilot sites where you run proper quantitative tests that measure the effect of the soundscape on people’s behaviour (see Golden Rule 4).

2. Make it congruent
Music is not the only (or even the best) type of sound to deploy in commercial spaces. After all, it is made with the strong intention of being listened to, so when it's played in the background there is a conflict of interest. The visual equivalent would be covering every inch of your walls with works of art.

Intention is very important with sound, so start with silence. It's a much-underrated sound, and it may just be your ideal soundscape. One step up from silence is generative sound. These soundscapes are made with the intention of being aural wallpaper, so they may create a more harmonious environment than music. Our own Ambifier™ system delivers exactly this kind of sound. Only with good reason (such as the filtering mentioned above) should you go to the next level and choose music, at which point please seek professional advice to style it and deliver it legally. Whatever you do, try to avoid repetition, for the sanity of your staff if no other reason. Three CDs in a shop for a year is a recipe for stress. A playlist should contain at least double the volume required for the time to be filled, ideally three times, so that you won't hear a song twice in any time slot, whether it's a full day or your two-hour peak time evening segment.

Please, please do invest in a sound delivery system that matches the quality of the rest of your branding. Don’t leave loudspeaker and amplifier choice to IT, M&E or facilities people! Your sound delivery system is a vital part of your brand experience. Take an interest; choose quality; and avoid hotspots by creating good coverage with decent speakers – which means avoiding systems that have a separate subwoofer. That may work at home, but in a commercial space it create nasty variation in the sound, including pools of strong bass for anyone unlucky enough to be standing under the woofer.

Once you’ve defined what sound would work best for your brand and worked out the most effective way for its application, you will have no trouble in making sure that all the sound you inject into your spaces resonates with your own organisation, brand, products, values, image, practices and so on. The first test of congruency (aka appropriateness) is to ask: is this sound right for us? You should be able to close your eyes in any branded space and know where you are.

The second, of course, is to ask: is this sound right for its context? This is where we consider environment (including acoustics, noise sources and intrusive noise); the people in the space (psychographics, demographics, tastes and fashions); the function of the space (for example if conversation or thinking are key, music is probably not the best choice). Whatever we design must fit all of these factors. Often that means changing the sound through the day. At The Sound Agency we generally recommend a converging strategy: playing calming sound when places are busy, and stimulating sound when they are emptier. If you can afford autogain to automatically maintain the perfect headroom over ambient noise levels, use it. Inappropriate volume is one of the commonest sins with commercial sound, and it loses sales.

3. Make it valuable
There are far too many commercial spaces playing music because they do it next door. I suspect that the world would sound rather different if they all asked the question: how can our sound add value to our customers?

Sound can be hugely valuable. It can warn us of danger (smoke alarms); it can inform us of events or of opportunities (radio news; in-store announcements of special offers); it can reduce the boredom of mundane tasks (music in factories); it can entertain, move and inspire us (music in films); it can guide us (zoning; travel announcements); most of all, it’s our primary connection with other humans (conversation).

When designing your soundscape, start by going into the space, closing your eyes and listening. Ask yourself, how can our sound add value to our customers? That question may lead you to start by removing some noisemakers or installing acoustic treatments to reduce reverberation time and create a calmer ambience.

Once you're happy the environment is optimal, ask: what extra sound will add value to our customers? If you can't answer, silence is golden. And remember, perking up bored staff is not a reason to inflict pumping music on your customers, who may need just the opposite. That’s why it’s usually a bad idea to let you staff play their own choice of music: their interests are very different from those of the customers. Fast music entrains people to move more quickly – and leave more quickly. If you do believe that music is the solution, follow the tips above to make sure you get music that's congruent as well as effective and valuable.

4. Test it and test it again
When it comes to measuring the effects of sound, it’s what people do that matters, not what they say. This is particularly true when the sound in question is music, because everybody has an opinion about music. In designing soundscapes, we can use both qualitative and quantitative research. Focus groups of customers (or, for larger audiences, customer segments) help us understand what sounds they like, and what they dislike. Auditory ‘mood boards’ and specific sounds and music tracks can be used as stimulus material. Then we can survey large samples with traditional questions or small samples with neurological and physiological measures to check the psycho-physiological effects (what psychologists call 'affect'). In large group research, the questions should be focused on measuring what we’re actually interested in – for example brand affinity, emotional state, general satisfaction or purchasing intentions – and not on what people think about the sound. What people say they like and how they behave due to sound are two very different things.

Once we have designed a soundscape or playlist, we can test the effects by alternating our proposed soundscape with no sound, or the old soundscape, again by measuring the differences in KPIs such as sales, dwell time, footfall, brand affinity and customer satisfaction, not asking people if they like it.

These rules might appear obvious, but it is surprising how many businesses fail to observe them in their application of sound, damaging their brands and revenues in the process.

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The Sound of Brands

2011-07-22T08:34:00.001+01:00

All businesses are making sound; most just aren’t controlling it – and the effects of this random noise are lost sales, undermined brands and lost customers.

Well over a thousand billion dollars are spent worldwide every year on how brands look: the brand books describing visual identities can be as thick as telephone directories for the world’s most famous and complex brands. They are intended to cover every possible aspect of branding… so it’s strange that I have had the following conversation many times:

Me: “Do you have a brand book?”
Marketing director: “Yes, of course we have a brand book.”
Me: “How many pages are about sound?”
Marketing director: “Er, none.”

Sound is probably the last great unexplored country for the marketing profession. Sound branding is a virtually virgin territory, rich with resources, that’s been behind us the whole time. Of course, sound is not the only sense we’ve been ignoring. The other two primary senses (smell and taste) and the range of touch, or haptic, senses (pressure, texture, temperature, balance and so on) are important too. Using the traditional Aristotelian five-sense model (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste), marketing guru Martin Lindstrom proposes ‘5D branding’ in his book BRANDsense. His extensive research showed that less than 10 per cent of the world’s top brands have a sensory branding platform (though this is forecast to increase to 35 per cent within five years).

I fully support the 5D approach, and commend Martin’s book to every marketer. However, sight and hearing must be considered the twin major senses for two reasons. First, they can both carry specific messages: we can say exactly what we want in either vision or sound. Smell, touch and taste can convey a large number of moods, feelings and ambiences, but not many specific messages. Second, sight and hearing can both be broadcast, and they are therefore the only two mass communication senses. So far, nobody has found a way of broadcasting smells or tastes.

We know that sound has four profound effects on people: physiological, psychological, cognitive and behavioural. The right sound can increase retail sales by up to 38% – but sound that’s incongruent with visual messaging will undermine impact by over 80%. From this perspective it’s clear that the marketing profession has always given too much weight to sight compared to sound. This may be because the mass communication media were sight-only (press and posters) for much of marketing’s formative history. It may also be that marketing’s whole strategic paradigm has been focused on the brand as promise (‘image’, a purely visual word); brand experience, which natural occurs in all five senses, is a relatively young discipline.

But as we know today, every brand is both a promise and an experience. Sound can play a major a role in both these aspects, though how major depends on the specific product, brand, market, territory and customer base. At its most potent, sound can make or break a brand. It must always be considered.

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The zen of coffee: master barista Brent Fortune interviewed at TEDGlobal

2011-07-15T07:54:00.001+01:00

The zen of coffee: master barista Brent Fortune interviewed at TEDGlobal (mp3)

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101 guidelines for eEtiquette Julia Leihener interview at TED

2011-07-13T13:02:00.001+01:00

101 guidelines for eEtiquette Julia Leihener interview at TED (mp3)

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TEDGlobal interview: Thomas Dolby

2011-07-13T10:52:00.001+01:00

TEDGlobal interview: Thomas Dolby (mp3)

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TEDGlobal: Ben Saunders, Arctic explorer

2011-07-12T22:59:00.001+01:00

TEDGlobal: Ben Saunders, Arctic explorer (mp3)

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TEDGlobal: Justin Hall-Tipping on free energy for all!

2011-07-12T16:23:00.001+01:00

TEDGlobal: Justin Hall-Tipping on free energy for all! (mp3)

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Rosalyn Chapel music decoded - Stuart Mitchell and Martin Aelred

2011-07-11T14:21:00.001+01:00

Rosalyn Chapel music decoded - Stuart Mitchell and Martin Aelred (mp3)

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Where two oceans meet

2011-06-01T08:24:00.001+01:00

Listen!

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Waulkmill Bay Orkney - peace at sunset

2011-05-30T22:13:00.001+01:00

Listen!

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Hadhirgaan at #orkneyfolkfest. 20 Orkney schoolchildren fiddlers - brilliant!!

2011-05-29T17:10:00.001+01:00

Listen!

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Gorgeous voice! Emily Smith at Orkney Folk Festival

2011-05-29T17:06:00.001+01:00

Listen!

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Orkney boo

2011-05-29T09:30:00.001+01:00

Listen!

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Sodcasting: more prevalent, and more serious, than you thought

2011-04-23T17:19:00.009+01:00

I was interviewed this week for a BBC Radio 4 programme on sodcasting (the programme will be broadcast in the UK on Tuesday June 14 at 1330) and it's made me think more deeply about the issue.

Sodcasting is defined by the online urban dictionary as "the act of playing music through the speaker on a mobile phone, usually on public transport. Commonly practiced by young people wearing polyester, branded sportswear with dubious musical taste".

I think we need to widen the definition from the much-berated hoodies on the bus genus (let's call this form territorial sodcasting, because it's very akin to dogs and lamp posts in its motivations) to include all thoughtless inflicting of noise on other people. One person's 'dubious musical taste' (aka noise) is another person's delight. It's well documented in field trials that those same teens who enjoy tinny renditions of N-Dubz or Eminem find the public playing of classical music unbearable enough to move away from it, which is why it is deployed at over 100 London tube stations and in many other places around the UK to move them on and to reduce vandalism. So is that state sodcasting?

This wider definition brings in some many other perpetrators; though far less obvious than the gang at the back of the bus, they can be equally annoying to those around them.

I tweeted the other day in real pain from a quiet airport lounge where around 30 people, all modestly and sensitively minding their business and controlling their noise, were forced to listen to one end of a phone conversation from a man who clearly thought he had to speak loudly enough to reach the UK from Germany without the help of modern technology. While most people murmur into their phone in public, dismayed by the very idea they could be overheard in an unintended bond of intimacy with those around them, there is a breed (is this perhaps genetic?) who unashamedly broadcast like this without a shred of awareness of their imposition on their neighbours. I think we can call this white collar sodcasting. (One even more irritating refinement of this behaviour is pacing, especially with a wired headset: the unwanted conversation swells and fades with predictable frequency, so that the dread of its certain return compounds one's simple irritation into a sort of exquisite torture.)

Then there's in-car sodcasting (or should that be ex-car sodcasting?), a practice taken to the extreme with insane 20,000 watt car stereo systems, but sadly perpetrated all over the world by enthusiastic amateurs who confuse their ability aggressively to dominate other people's soundscape with their self worth. These are not the same thing, guys. Please get some therapy, grow up and enjoy your music in private, with the windows up.

And there's more... what about mechanical sodcasting? In my book I quote the estimate from the EU noise mapping project that one noisy scooter driving through Paris in the middle of the night can wake as many as 200,000 people. That's a major piece of sodcasting! Its less impressive but far more widespread relatives include leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, power tools and the like.

We're not done yet. Domestic sodcasting, aka neighbour noise, is a major social issue, and it kills people. Not the noise itself, but the ensuing arguments, which (especially when added to alcohol and firearms) have all too often ended in murder. Just last month there was the tragic case of a man who strangled his own daughter in a row about TV noise, but there are so many of these sad events, including the famous 2008 case of the Cleveland fireman who shot dead three people because of firework party noise. Duration, repetition and intensity are all aggravating factors in these disputes.

Which brings us to the big one: commercial sodcasting. I don't mean sodcasting for money: thankfully I don't believe there is any money to be made by imposing unwanted noise on people. I do mean commercial organisations thoughtlessly broadcasting noise of all kinds. That's thoughtless as in completely unconscious (noisy vehicles, chiller cabinets in supermarkets and corner shops, squeaking trolleys, checkout beeps) – and equally, thoughtless as in conscious but unconcerned with the consequences (mindless music in shops, restaurants and other public spaces). I have blogged elsewhere about the commercial pressures for this latter practice: the music industry is desperate for the cash and public performance is a rare revenue growth area. In most cases, shops play pop music for no better reason than that every other shop does it too. It's become a meme.

Fortunately for pressure groups like PipeDown and their high-profile proponents such as Daniel Bahrenboim and Peter Maxwell-Davis, the science shows that companies can make more money by designing appropriate, pleasing soundscapes for commercial spaces (just like aural wallpaper, and including careful acoustic design) than by playing pop everywhere. We can therefore hope that the mindless music meme will die out soon.

The motives for these various forms of sodcasting may differ, but there are two necessary factors in all cases. First, lack of listening. As I have recently said in my TEDxDanubia talk, people are losing the habit of listening to the world, and especially to other people – and if you don't listen, you simply are not so conscious of the effects of your own noise on others. Second, lack of empathy. In my view this is directly related to the first factor: if we don't listen to one another, we won't understand one another's realities and so we can't empathise so well. I suspect it may also be a by-product of the modern, Internet version of connectedness: we choose to care about the friend we're on the phone to, while ignoring completely the effects of our loud conversation on the people sitting right next to us. Perhaps our empathy is becoming selective and routed through the web, instead of naturally being bestowed on the human beings around us.

The solution? Legislation is not the answer, and nor is citizen power, as anyone who has ever approached a sodcaster to ask them to stop will know all too well. I believe the heart of the solution is in teach listening skills in schools. If we teach our children how to listen properly to the world, and especially to each other, they will understand the consequences of their own sound and be far more responsible in making it. Sodcasting is a symptom of societal deafness. Let's collectively open our ears and start being responsible for our sound environment.

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Chris Clark (UK Sound Map) interview

2011-04-14T13:44:00.001+01:00

Listen!

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Wind pain?

2011-04-13T10:51:00.001+01:00

Whilst renewables are clearly essential in so many ways, it's vital that we understand all their effects, positive and negative. Giant wind turbines have three downsides, of which potentially the most serious is noise.

The first downside is visual. Anyone who's visited Denmark can testify to the visual blight huge turbines create. This can of course be overcome by offshoring or placing in sensitive locations - though wind does usually demand prominence.

The second is ecological. I am not an expert but I believe some birds are being killed (though at the moment the numbers appear to be small compared to, say, deaths from domestic cats), and it seems likely that ecosystems are being disrupted in other ways. This is not my field but I'm sure there are effects and that people are investigating them.

The third downside is aural. The noise of those giant blades can be loud and can travel a long way from the turbine: people living up to 2 km away have reported disturbance, with predictable effects on sleep and elevated levels of stress and annoyance. The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology regularly has discussions of the topic for anyone interested - you can join here - and there is also a growing body of academic research. An expert panel review in 2009 (sponsored by the wind turbine manufacturers) found no adverse health effects though it did admit that annoyance results – rather disingenuously the panel concluded that 'annoyance is not a disease'. This ignores the findings of the WHO that long-term exposure to noise, working through the mechanism of stress and annoyance produced, does lead to increased incidences of many diseases, including heart attacks, strokes, gastric issues, depression and more.

The evidence against wind turbines is patchy, maybe because the big bucks from industry are all paying for evidence that supports wind energy. Dr Nina Pierpoint's book Wind Turbine Syndrome may have been based on a small sample, but we should not dismiss collections of individual, qualitative evidence, and it does seem that she is becoming a magnet for a growing, though still small, number of personal testimonies of major negative noise effects from around the world. I know from my years studying the effects of sound that in general very few people complain about noise: for example, noisy shops could claim (just like the wind industry does) that nobody complains, implying that there is no problem – and yet many retailers are losing up to 30% of potential sales as people leave the store faster or don't even enter, often without being conscious of the reason for their behaviour. We have become used to suppressing noise, so it should come as no surprise that there are few complaints about wind turbine noise. This does not mean there are no adverse effects.

Giant turbines, especially the older ones, create two sounds in my experience: a tearing sound as the blades rip through and also a thumping bass sound, both of which are not constant and therefore are probably as irritating as a dripping tap (though much louder) and as hard to ignore. Research shows that sound we can't control, and particularly regular, intermittent sound like this, is the most annoying and affecting. There is also the possibility that infrasound (ultra low frequency noise) is in play, though the jury is out on this whole topic. Much more impartial research is needed to defuse the current pro v anti posturing, where individual campaigners like Dr Pierpoint claim devastating effects and industry consultants like Dr Geoff Leventhall dismiss any negative effect at all. I suspect the truth, as so often, lies somewhere in the middle. It would be odd if high energy, low frequency vibrations did not affect human beings in some way given that we're entirely composed of vibrating matter, though probably some people are more susceptible than others, just as with audible noise. Dr Pierpoint wants a 2 km gap betwen turbines and people's houses. This may be on the high side, but from my experience I can say that I would definitely not want to live close to one, and certainly not within 1 km, whatever the pro-wind research says.

For wind turbines, the phenomenon of super-additivity (cross-modal effects where one sense multiplies the effects of a stimulus in another) seems to be in play, and is an issue which has not yet been addressed by any of the research I have seen. The visual pollution seems to be making people more sensitive to the aural; the annoyance factor seems to vary with the context, for example the profile of the location, with rural areas and hilly or rocky terrain increasing the likelihood of annoyance.

It's a balancing act of course... each energy source has its pros and cons, but it is important we know what they are before diving in head first, as the Japanese experience with nuclear power has just shown: industry experts were categorical that Fukushima was earthquake-proof when it was constructed, and they were wrong. In the UK there are now such large incentives for farmers to erect turbines that it pays for them not to farm land and instead to lease it for wind power; once erected, these things are not so easy to remove. The noise effects are as yet unclear, so I do believe we urgently need to know far more about this before we cover our countryside with wind farms.

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My Thinking Digital talk

2011-04-04T14:51:00.001+01:00

Last year I had the great pleasure of speaking at Thinking Digital, Herb Kim's brilliant tech visionary conference in Newcastle (or to be more precise Gateshead). It was a fantastic experience and I realise that I have never posted a link to the video. I hope that the embed code inside this post will give access here. Just in case that doesn't work, you can see the talk on the Thinking Digital website here.

<p>Juilan Treasure speaking at #TDC10 from Herb Kim on Vimeo.</p>

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2011-03-01T08:36:00.001Z

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Very excited to receive the cover design for my book Sound Business in Japanese. Yamaha Music Media are publishing it in Japan and it's just goner to the printers! I hope top be able to visit soon, as the Japanese are intensely auditory in their history and culture... who else in the world designs garden sculptures that are buried underground in order to make random soft clunking sounds that require silence and careful listening to be perceived at all? Or gather together in a ceremony to hear a flower opening each year? I hope they enjoy the book, and that it makes a difference in the modern urban soundscapes that have all but replaced these subtle engagements with the world of sound.

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Breakfast for the brain

2011-01-13T17:24:00.001Z

I hugely enjoyed taking part in a Wf360 Inner Circle™ breakfast hosted by TBWA in London this week. The cast was stellar, with luminaries from banks, logistics, airline, technology and entrepreneurship. The topic was innovation, and a very thought-provoking two hours it proved - particularly coming on top of my session a few days earlier with Professor Semir Zeki on BBC World Service's The Forum. Semir is a top neuro-aestheticist whose view is that creativity springs from dissatisfaction, and this same view was proposed about innovation at the breakfast. But does it - and are creativity and innovation the same thing?

Taking the second question first, I suggested at the breakfast that innovation is channelled creativity. My friend Andy Hobsbawm put it very succinctly: creativity is necessary for innovation, but not sufficient - in other words, you can't be innovative without being creative, but you can be creative without being innovative (the advertising and fashion industries were suggested as examples of this state).

I also think there are two kinds of corporate innovation: doing what you do in new and better ways (like mobile boarding passes) and doing something completely new (remember Virgin Cola? and will Facebook really become a credible bank?). The second is obviously more dangerous, and you could argue that it was banks dabbling with this form, rather than staying in the safer waters of the first kind of innovation, that brought our economic system to the verge of collapse.

The core issue is knowing what you are really doing, which is where innovation can be structured: it's vital to ask the question "what value do we really add?" from many different perspectives, and continuously. That's how you discover that you're a top global logistics expert not a courier (UPS), a superb ecommerce service not a bookstore (Amazon), or a service provider not a box shifter (IBM). Many companies have gone to the wall by getting attached to one perspective on what they do, and not seeing their own full value.

And what of the question of dissatisfaction: is creativity just scratching an itch? Does the artist have to be tortured? I think there is more than one dimension here too. Many musicians I've met speak of the music coming through them, of effectively being a channel for a force which is not of them; they are almost involuntary in the moment of creation. There is a strong spiritual dimension to creativity like this, and I don't think it has anything to do with dissatisfaction. Also I strongly believe that creativity is a basic human quality (though we educate it out of our children - see Ken Robinson's famous TED talk on this); given reasonable circumstances, we're naturally creative - and in fact if this natural state is denied the result so often is destructive behaviour.

So while a creative solution certainly requires a problem in order to come into being, and while there are many itches that get creatively scratched all over the world every day, there are also a vast number of creative acts that spring from some sort of muse (the spiritual path) or just from the joy of creating. Maybe the best companies have discovered the trick of nurturing the joy of innovating, and well as being good at problem-solving.

Wf360's founder Susan Willet Bird has blogged about the breakfast and my work here, and Wf360's Inner Circle™ program is described here

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Mobile Madness!

2011-01-05T16:42:00.001Z

I just recorded a show for the BBC World Service. It's called The Forum, and I was honoured to be on with Charles Simic and Semir Zeki - eminent company indeed, and a fascinating discussion about creativity, perception and language ensued. The programme will be broadcast on the World Service and Radio 4, and also will be available as a podcast from the Forum's website.

They ask me to rant with a controversial soapbox-style idea for 60 seconds. No problem ranting - but just for a minute? That's tough! Anyway I thought it might amuse you to have the rant posted here, since it's one that will resonate with many who care about sound. So here it is:

(rant starts)

We have licences and laws governing the use of our cars. There should now be licences and laws for the public use of mobile devices so that the weight of society is aligned to make inconsiderate people change their ways.

I'm talking about behaviour such as

* causing a breach of the peace (especially in confined public spaces like buses and trains) by talking loudly on a mobile

* irritating fellow travellers with music overspilling from headphones

* playing distorted music through the inadequate loudspeakers of mobile phones in public places ('sodcasting')

* street offences such as stopping short or causing an obstruction on a busy pavement while texting

* holding loud and pompous conversations on mobiles (especially with headsets, and especially while pacing up and down in airport lounges and similar)

* playing games with the beeps turned on

* disrespecting people by having intimate or embarrassing conversations and thus effectively denying their existence and feelings.

At the moment, if someone is brave enough to complain, the result is often verbal or sometimes even physical abuse. We need to align the power of societal consensus so that just as jumping a red light is universally unacceptable, so are behaviours like sodcasting.

Penalties could be a range of device confiscation periods (just like losing your driving licence) and corrective educational courses. This would require mobile police (in every sense of the phrase) which could be a voluntary force much like the Guardians on the New York subway. But the weight should be on educating people, ideally starting in school, to be thoughtful, considerate and mindful of the consequences of their behaviour on others. That may be idealistic, but without a consensus and some way of enforcing it we are heading for a digitally connected but physically divided society.

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SPARK radio show

2010-11-22T23:23:00.001Z

Last week I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by the excellent Nora Young on Canada's Spark radio show, which was broadcast on Sunday Nov 21. It was a fascinating show, covering noise, filtering and overload in lots of ways and includes an interview with one of my favourite authors, William Gibson - the man who said: "The future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed." Nora's team were a delight to deal with and have done a superb job editing the piece. You can hear the show here.

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Can music be good (or bad) for you?

2010-10-27T23:15:00.001+01:00

Just wrote this article for the ITHP website. I will in due course repost the whole article here, but for now I'll just link to it.

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Audi Sound Branding Identity

2010-10-24T13:05:00.001+01:00

Audi's recent announcement about its very comprehensive Sound Identity seems to have set a new standard for our industry. You can see a rather self-congratulatory 'making of' documentary here on YouTube, and several of my friends in the industry have blogged about it (for example Ruth Simmons and Karhelinz Illner. What captures my attention is the commitment of the client. Sound is being treated as an essential component of the Audi brand, not the icing on the cake, and resources been made available to work that through into consistent and on-brand audio in all Audi's marketing communication. This is a huge step forward, and creates a benchmark for all major brands to aim at.

But is it enough? I'm not on the inside of this project, but so far I have seen Audi covering five of the eight expressions of a brand in sound we differentiate at The Sound Agency - as shown in the BrandSound™ graphic.

Audi have defined Brand Music (including the approach of creating a library for all future uses, which is excellent); Sonic Logo (the heartbeat); Advertising Sound (now consistent and derived from brand values); Product Sound (pretty well-defined in general in the car industry); and Brand Voice (including recorded on-brand and standardised voicemail announcements). This is a far more comprehensive approach than many, which is why there is so much excitement about this case study in the industry.

But I wonder if they are also tackling Branded Audio (podcasts, apps and other high-value sound given or sold to customers or other stakeholders); Telephone Sound (have they looked at their IVR system's structure and live voice interactions on the phone?); and most of all Soundscapes (are they redesigning the aural experience of being in their showrooms? For example I know that the huge flagship Audi showroom in West London is very challenged in that way, with plenty of unpleasant noise and challenging acoustics). The research is clear and comprehensive on the importance of retail soundscapes in terms of their effect on sales - but in my experience most car showrooms have predominantly hard surfaces causing unsuitably long reverberation times, and the sound sources tend to be uncontrolled - for example SkyTVNews on plasma screens or commercial radio playing on ceiling loudspeakers, or even both at the same time. That kind of set up pipes in negative messages (such as bad news) and inappropriate sound (such as fast-paced music) and even allows competing brands to advertise into your own branded space, which is obviously undesirable. The far better alternative is branded, generative soundscapes designed to create an appropriate ambience and to enhance the desired state in visitors, which for showrooms is relaxed, unhurried and alert.

A truly comprehensive approach to BrandSound™ will cover all auditory interactions. Audi's commitment is a welcome inspiration to its peers, but it seems there is still potential for them to explore.

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Skavlan and TEDxNewSt

2010-10-24T11:29:00.001+01:00

Last week I appeared on the top chat show for Sweden and Norway. It's called Skavlan after its host, Fredrik Skavlan. I had a great time doing the show and they've now posted it here on the website of Norwegian TV; it'll be up until November 21.

They've edited it, so some of my lists are cut short, and my plea for businesses to take control of the sound they're making has disappeared - but overall it still gets the message across that we all can gain from listeing consciously, and businesses can gain from making sound consciously. I was last on the show, so it might help to know that Norwegian comedienne Anne-Kat had joked that bands have a pecking order for getting girls with the drummer always at the bottom, and that Swedish pop star Håkan Hellström had been talking about being brought up by a child psychiatrist mother.

My TEDx talk on brands and sound has also just gone up on the TEDx YouTube channel here.

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Retail sound: article in The Grocer

2010-10-22T17:00:00.001+01:00

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The Grocer is the UK's leading magazine for the retail trade. I've only just learned that it featured a major article about sound and retail in July - and here it is. I'm featured, along with Professors Adrian North and Charles Spence, as well as my friend Simon Harrop from BRAND sense agency. I think it's very powerful review of the great opportunity many retailers have yet to explore: creating appropriate, effective and branded soundscapes in their retail spaces.

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Stockholm - soundscape leader?

2010-10-21T16:38:00.004+01:00

I'm in lovely sunny Stockholm today, just for one day, to record an appearance on Skavlan, the top Swedish/Norwegian chat show, which came about because of my second TED talk on sound and health. This is a very exciting opportunity to raise the consciousness of sound of three million people so I hope I get the message across! I type this blog in my dressing room minutes before going on... I am happy to report that Fredrik Skavlan is absolutely charming and he and his lovely team have put me very much at ease.

While here I visited the Museum of Architecture, where (almost lost among the huge visual exhibits) there is a small exhibition by Björn Hellström on aural architecture. It's in two parts. The first shows a model of the proposed massive redevelopment of the Slussen area, and with a simple before and after sound installation demonstrates how bad it will sound if nobody pays attention to the noise levels and installs acoustic treatments. Hellström's point is that aural architecture falls between the cracks: no town planner, architect, designer, engineer or councillor is tasked with thinking about it, so they all miss it and the result is the usual - accidental and unpleasant, just the exhaust gas of the urban machine. He argues for a new breed of 'acoustic architect' - though I prefer the term aural architect coined by Barry Blesser in his fabulous book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? - one person who is completely focused on the question: how will this building sound?

The second part is more fun and equally thought-provoking. It's a single darkened room with a multi-channel sound installation on 10 lovely Genelec loudspeakers, which simulate the soundscape in Mariatorget, a square with busy roads at both ends in which there is a permanent sound and light installation. As usual, the sound feels much more intrusive when you can't see what's making it - much like what happens when I play clients their retail soundscapes on headphones. Our eyes acts as a kind of automatic compressor, preparing us for sounds a fraction in advance. Without the visual cues, the traffic noise in the installation is dominating, and leaving the room creates a visceral effect of peace. Whilst inside the installation, habituation occurs and the more delicate sounds of the art installation - chimes and light leaf sounds - emerge. The question Hellström's asking in this piece is: what happens when we see things we can't hear, and hear things we can't see? Does it matter? This resonates greatly with the schizophonia concept from Murray Schafer that I discussed in my TED talk and that seems to have rattled quite a few cages on the forums. It's an important question for modern living in my opinion, and one that needs to be researched.

Next visit to Stockholm I hope to swing by the University, which is home to the Soundscape Support to Health project, started by Birgitte Berglund in 1999. This is the oldest and probably the most influential scientific soundscape project in the world; Professor advises the WHO on the health effects of soundscapes, and the group, led by Östen Axelsson, is working on an ISO definition of soundscape quality. Stockholm University has just hosted a global conference on Designing Soundscape for Sustainable Urban Development, so this is the current hotspot for urban soundscape thinking. Exciting stuff, and with clarity I think will come feedback on what (and how) to improve. There is hope for our poor urban ears!

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Architecture for the senses

2010-10-21T14:03:00.001+01:00

Listen!

via AudioBoo

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Science or pseudoscience? Sound, music and health.

2010-10-02T19:24:00.000+01:00

My TED talk on sound and health has created a lively debate, I am delighted to say: my intention was precisely to get people thinking and talking about sound and its effects on health. I wish I'd had more time during the talk to give references for the claims and assertions I made, and one purpose of this blog is to offer those for anyone who is interested in knowing more.

This is also for all those who seem hung up on the concept of proof, and have used the term 'pseudoscience' in what feels like the same way the word 'witch' was used in Europe and the US. It's sufficient to damn, and no evidence is required - ironic given that it is itself an accusation of lack of evidence. This is concerning, because of course the scientific method is not at all concerned with proof: it operates by people proposing hypotheses and then testing them to destruction. There is no proof in empirical science; there is only a current absence of dis-proof. An approach which dismisses any idea or hypothesis because it's not 'scientific' is itself anti-scientific! The true scientific response is to take the idea and then devise ways of testing it. Out-of-hand dismissal is the real pseudo-science.

In a wider context, the stance that assertions are acceptable only if backed by evidence also denies some of the more interesting areas of human thought, such as philosophy and religion, not to mention large parts of the social sciences and much of modern physics and cosmology. Any comprehensive study of sound and music touches on many other areas of study, such as physics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience, and so must involve considering many theses and ideas that are untestable, or at least currently untested. I was surprised by the vehemence of some of the feedback to my talk, where people seemed very angry in dismissing assertions that lacked sources rather than investigating them, and where the very mention of the tradition of sound healing was enough to damn the whole talk as 'new age' - another of the heinous condemnations deemed sufficient for instant dismissal by the pseudo-science wolves. I like this perspective from the eminent psychologist Carl Seashore:

"Practically, metaphysics and philosophy proper are not separated, and they are not marked off in sharp distinction from science, on the one hand and common sense, on the other. In fact the historical development of any question, such as the nature of musical value, arises as the main question and soon takes on both metaphysical and supernatural interpretations. These are criticized in philosophy and gradually analyzed and clarified by scientific methods; this done, the information tends to be regarded as a matter of common knowledge or common sense." (Seashore CE 1938 Psychology of music. New York, McGraw-Hill p376)

I hope that my talk opens the minds of those who had dismissed the idea that sound can improve (or damage) health, and connects them with the work mentioned in this blog. And I hope that science does much more testing on the effects of sound on health so that we can see evidence for some of the hypotheses I put forward in the talk.

Let me give some background to each of the assertions I made, and clarify where I was suggesting a hypothesis or just giving a personal opinion.

"Nada brahma - the world is sound" is actually the title of a fascinating book by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. It spans science, religion and philosophy, and is thought-provoking throughout. Warning: much of it is 'unproven'!

Vibration / you are a chord - this is obvious from physics, though it's admittedly somewhat metaphorical to call the combined rhythms and vibrations within a human being a chord, which we understand to be an aesthetically pleasant audible collection of tones. But "the fundamental characteristic of nature is periodic functioning in frequency, or musical pitch." (Eagle CT 1991 The quantum reality of music. In Music education; Why? What? How? ed S Hauptfleisch p 43-66, South Africa, HSRC Publications). Matter is vibrating energy; therefore, we are a collection of vibrations of many kinds, which can be considered a chord.

Health as harmony of our vibrations. I qualified this carefully to say "one definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony." Taking the WHO definition of health ("a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity") opens at least three dimensions to the concept, two of which have nothing to do with the medical profession. This suggested definition of health is not a 'proven' proposition, which is why I qualified so carefully: however it is an interesting idea, still in the first of Seashore's stages of development (above) - and so may be considered supernatural by some until science tests it properly. For more on the idea of vibrational harmony and health, see (Wolf FA 1981 The body quantum: the new physics of body, mind and health. New York, Macmillan) or (Steve Halpern 1985 Sound Health: The music and sounds that make us whole. New York, Harpercollins) and try to set aside anti-'new age' prejudice to find out if there are any interesting ideas in there for you. I think there is plenty in this concept to explore and I hope scientific research turns its attention to the area.

On a philosophical level, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and Confucius all wrote at length about the relationship between harmony, music and health (social and physical). Here are a couple of references - there are many!

"Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful." (Socrates, in The Republic of Plato 1888 Oxford Clarendon Press p 88)

"The Yi Jing develops the notion of ‘grand harmony’ (tai he). It is the concept that the entire universe constitutes a great harmony. ‘How great is the Qian (Heaven)! From it the myriad things originate under Heaven . . . With the changes of the Qian way, the myriad things all keep on their own path of life. Thus they preserve the grand harmony’ (Yi Jing: Tuan). Accordingly, ‘grand harmony’ is the most important ideal in the Yi Jing. The world is full of different things, yet all these things harmonize as they go through incessant changes. The ‘Yi Jing’ is considered the primary text among all Confucian texts. The notion of ‘grand harmony’ sets the stage for all other Confucian ideals, social as well as individual." (Chenyang Li 2008 The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism in Philosophy Compass 3/3 p423–435)

New research by Jay Kennedy here shows that Plato not only wrote about the power of music on society and personal health - he embedded musical structure in his writings.

10 octaves v one octave. An octave is a doubling in frequency. The visual spectrum in frequency terms is 400-790 THz, so it's one octave. Humans with great hearing can hear from 20 Hz to 20 KHz, which is ten octaves.

Listening positions. This is a concept I develop in my book Sound Business - not research-based analysis, just a useful set of perspectives that can help people to be more conscious about their listening. As well as the two I mention in the talk, other listening positions include judgemental (or critical), active (or reflective), passive and so on. Some are well known and widely used; for example, active listening is trained into many therapists and counsellors, as well as forming the backbone of parenting and management systems such as Parent Effectiveness Training). I regret that my humorous explanation using affectionate gender stereotypes offended some among the more politically correct; the audience in the room, and I hope most viewers, found it amusing and the concept useful. I don't believe that generalisations based on gender are by definition sexist - sometimes they can be enlightening and helpful. But that's a whole new debate!

Noise stats. Where to start with the horrendous figures about noise and its effects?

The UK National Noise Attitude Survey (NAS) says that 24% of respondents in Greater London reported that noise spoilt their home life to some extent, with 10% reporting that their home life was spoilt either quite a lot or totally.

The 2000 UK Building Research Establishment report says that 2% of the British population - more than a million people - suffered noise of over 60dBA for 90% of the day. This compares with 1.2% ten years earlier.

The EU says “around 20 percent of the Union's population or close on 80 million people suffer from noise levels that scientists and health experts consider to be unacceptable, where most people become annoyed, where sleep is disturbed and where adverse health effects are to be feared. An additional 170 million citizens are living in so-called 'grey areas' where the noise levels are such to cause serious annoyance during the daytime.” (FUTURE NOISE POLICY European Commission Green Paper Brussels 1996).

The World Health Organization says that "Traffic noise alone is harming the health of almost every third person in the WHO European Region. One in five Europeans is regularly exposed to sound levels at night that could significantly damage health." Check the WHO website for more.

My claim about 25% of Europeans suffering from debilitating noise comes from the WHO study Community Noise by Birgitta Berglund and Thomas Lindvall Stockholm, Sweden, 1995: "Almost 25% of the European population is exposed, in one way or another, to transportation noise over 65 dBA (an average energy equivalent to continuous A-weighted sound pressure level over 24 hours) (Lambert & Vallet, 1994). This figure is not the same all over Europe. In some countries more than half of the population is exposed, in others less than 10%. When one realizes that at 65 dBA sound pressure level, sleeping becomes seriously disturbed and most people become annoyed, it is clear that community noise is a genuine environmental health problem."

The WHO is also the source for the startling estimate about noise killing 200,000 people a year. Noise does not just annoy; it increases the risk of death significantly. The WHO LARES report, available here, proves that noise causes many illnesses. It concludes: "...for noise induced sleep disturbances, traffic noise annoyance and neighbourhood noise annoyance, the identified health effects are independent of socio-economic status and housing conditions. The elevated relative risks are expressed in the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system and the musculoskeletal system, as well as through depression." The WHO findings estimate that 3% of deaths from ischaemic heart disease result from long-term exposure to noise. With 7 million deaths a year globally, that means 210,000 people a year are dying of noise. (I said 200,000 in Europe - my apologies for that error; hard to remember every fact perfectly in the pressure of a short TED talk. Nevertheless, even globally this is a horrifying number!)

A wide variety of studies have examined the question of the external costs of noise to society especially transport noise. The estimates range from 0.2% to 2% of GDP. The EU says: "It can be generally concluded from the present state of knowledge that exposure to environmental noise acts as a stressor to health as it may lead to measurable changes in e.g. blood pressure, heart rate, vasoconstriction, endocrine excretion levels and admission rates to mental hospitals... Present economic estimates of the annual damage in the EU due to environmental noise range from EUR 13 billion to 38 billion. Elements that contribute are a reduction of housing prices, medical costs, reduced possibilities of land use and cost of lost labour days.” (Future Noise Policy European Commission Green Paper 1996).

According to a 1999 U.S. Census report, Americans named noise as the number one problem in neighborhoods. Of 102.8 million reporting households, 11.6 million (11.3%) stated that street or traffic noise was bothersome, and 4.5 million (4.4%) said it was so bad that they wanted to move. For the category "other bothersome conditions," 2.7 million (2.6%) named noise. Additionally, 5.3 million (5.1%) said that they were bothered by building neighbornoise. More Americans are bothered by noise than by crime, odors, and other problems listed under "other bothersome conditions."

Then there is noise and society, with its effect on behaviour. The US report Noise and its effects (Administrative Conference of the United States, Alice Suter, 1991) says: "Even moderate noise levels can increase anxiety, decrease the incidence of helping behavior, and increase the risk of hostile behavior in experimental subjects. These effects may, to some extent, help explain the "dehumanization" of today's urban environment."

Maybe Confucious and Socrates had a point.

Schizophonia. As I did credit in the talk, this word was coined by the great Canadian audiologist Murray Schafer. In his essential book The Tuning of the World (1977) Schafer says: "I coined the term schizophonia in The New Soundscape [an earlier book] intending it to be a nervous word. Related to schizophrenia, I wanted it to convey the same sense of aberration and drama. Indeed, the overkill of hi-fi gadgetry not only contributes generously to the lo-fi problem, but it creates a synthetic soundscape in which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes are providing the operative signals directing modern life" (p 91). Schafer was always concerned about the 'hi-fi' quality of natural sound being displaced by the 'lo-fi' quality of much recorded sound - and that was before digital audio and compression were invented. My assertion that continual schizophonia is unhealthy is an opinion, stated as such - and possible a hypothesis that science could and should test. You only have to consider the strange, unreal jollity of train carriages now - full of lively conversation but none of it with anyone else in the carriage - to entertain the possibility that this is somehow unnatural. Old-style silence at least had the virtue of being an honest connection with those around us. Now we ignore our neighbours, merrily discussing intimate details of our lives as if the people around us simply don't exist. Surely this is not a positive social phenomenon? Again, research is required.

Compressed music. However clever the technology and the psychoacoustic algorithms applied, there are many issues with data compression of music, as superbly discussed in this excellent article by Robert Harley back in 1991. My example of course failed to transfer into the video, since all the audio is compressed for the web! It did work in the room. I have posted the sound here if you want to listen on headphones or decent loudspeakers and see if you can spot the difference. My assertion that listening to highly compressed music makes people tired and irritable is a hypothesis based on personal and anecdotal experience - and again it's one that I hope will be tested by researchers.

Hearing loss and headphone abuse. Over 19% of American 12-19 year olds exhibited some hearing loss in 2005-2006 - an increase of almost 5% since 1988-94. (Change in Prevalence of Hearing Loss in US Adolescents, Josef Shargorodsky, MD, MPH; Sharon G. Curhan, MD, ScM; Gary C. Curhan, MD, ScD; Roland Eavey, MD, SM JAMA. 2010;304(7):772-778), reported with comments from the researchers here.

The university study with 61% of freshmen showing hearing loss is from The Power Of Sound (Joshua Leeds 2001, Healing Arts Press p 92).

The rule of thumb that your headphones are too loud if you can't hear someone talking loudly to you over them is fairly common among audiologists. For example, Robert Fifer, an associate professor of audiology and speech pathology at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, says: "The ear doesn't care what kind of sound it is, it really only cares how loud that sound is and for what time duration." Fifer advises keeping the volume at a level where you can still hear conversation around you. "If you can still hear what people are saying around you, you are at a safe level," he says. "If the volume is turned so loudly that you can no longer hear conversation around you, or if someone has to shout at you at a distance of about 2 feet or 3 feet to get your attention, then you are up in the hazardous noise range."

The assertions that WWB and silence are good for you seem to be uncontroversial. Perhaps they resonate with everyone's experience.

Sound healing. This seems to have been a red rag to many of the 'pseudoscience' bulls. I was including music therapy and sound therapy in the one category. Music therapy is a well-established form of treatment in the context of mainstream medicine for many conditions, including the ones I mention (dementia, autism). Just Google 'music therapy' and you will find a wealth of references and case studies. Here are a few:

Katagiri J. The effect of background music and song texts on the emotional understanding of children with autism. J Music Ther. 2009 Spring;46(1):15-31.

Kim J. et al. Emotional, motivational and interpersonal responsiveness of children with autism in improvisational music therapy. Autism. 2009 Jul;13(4):389-409.

Stephens CE. Spontaneous imitation by children with autism during a repetitive musical play routine. Autism. 2008 Nov;12(6):645-71.

Music therapy is the use of music to improve health. Less mainstream, though intellectually no more difficult to accept, is sound healing: the use of tones or sounds to improve health through entrainment (affecting one oscillator with a stronger one). This is a very old practice: shamanic and community chant, as well as various resonators like bells and gongs, date back to the earliest societies and are still in use in many cultures around the world. Just because something is old and not done in hospitals doesn't mean that it's 'new-age BS' as some have commented. Doubtless there are charlatans offering snake oil (as in many fields) but I suspect there is much to investigate, and just as herbal medicine gave rise to many of the drugs we use today, I suspect there are rich resources and fascinating insights to be gleaned when science starts to unpack the traditions of sound healing.

Music made with love. Duke Ellington claimed there are only two kinds of music: "good, and the other kind". I suggest an alternative split: music made with love, and the rest. I agree with Manfred Clynes (check out his interesting theory of essentic forms) that music is an excellent transmitter of emotions - in other words people can receive the feeling that went into the making of it. That's what I meant when I recommended listening to music that was made with love - by which I do not mean the people involved were in a blissful state; I just mean that they cared about the outcome and were making it for its own sake, not for some other reason (such as money, status or contractual obligation).

I do think you can tell the difference - and I think it has a different effect on the listener. I was rushing to finish the talk at this point, so I couldn't qualify my specific recommendations: of course Mozart and devotional music are just some of the varieties that are often recommended by expert listeners such as Tomatis. I didn't mean to dictate taste to anyone - many kinds of music can be good for you (and what that means is highly contextual). But if health is equated with lack of stress, then it's hard to see how prolonged listening to music like rap and metal, with their prevailing emotional charge of anger and aggression respectively, can have a positive impact. There is plenty of research on this general area: for example see Heavy Metal Music And Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation, which includes further references. Personal variations are huge of course, and I have no doubt that for some people listening to death metal is health-enhancing. However, as a rule I expect that further research will show that music with a positive emotional charge is better for the health than "the other kind".

Musicians have bigger brains. This is slightly misleading as one commentator pointed out. A study by Heidelberg University's Schneider found that people with musical experience had larger amounts of grey matter in the region called the Heschl's gyrus. The structure contained 536 to 983 cubic mm of grey matter in professional musicians and 172 to 450 cubic mm in non-musicians. (Nature Neuroscience, 2002). This does not mean that all musicians have bigger brains than everyone else, just that music leads to an increase in size in this area. However, other things being equal, it does mean that practising music as I suggest will increase the size of a person's brain.

I hope this helps answer some of the queries raised by viewers, and makes a contribution raising awareness of sound and its effects on health. I welcome your thoughts!

My new TED talk

2010-10-01T09:35:00.001+01:00

I'm excited to say that TED have chosen to broadcast my short talk on sound and health this week, adding to my previous TED talk on the effects of sound on people. The new talk is creating quite a debate, stirring up some hard-core fans of the scientific method because I dare to mention sound healing... strange that they don't seem to know about the traditions in philosophy and pre-modern science (Plato, Pythagoras, Confucius) of equating harmony and pleasing music with health.

At the same time the talk is attracting great support and positive feedback from many who are sharing their own experiences of noise, sound and health. I'm delighted to have had almost 20,000 views already in just a few days, because my aim was to open this conversation - and raise people's consciousness of the importance of managing sound.

Do take a look if you get seven minutes spare - and if you feel like it, share it with others and do weigh into the debate, either in the relatively civilised TED forum or in the wild and woolly YouTube debate. Links are below.

Also, for those of you in the UK, the Financial Times this Saturday (October 2) features a profile of me and of The Sound Agency's work in the column by Mike Southon (the Beermat Entrepreneur).

Ethnic conflict and civil war has declined in frequency by 30% over the last 20 years. However ceasefires are no guarantee of peace.We must have leadership, civil society, diplomacy and also well designed institutions if we are to keep this decline happening.

Eric Berlow

If we embrace complexity and use good visualisation techniques we will discover that there is clarity and simplicity on the other side. Complexity is not complication. Patterns are the guide to understanding.

William Perrin, Community activist

He is Blair's former web advisor, and lives near Kings Cross in a rough area, and (like a growing number of local communities in the UK) is using the web as a tool for community action to improve the local environment and funnel community pressure for change to the authorities. He proposed a charter for government (still locked in a post/telephone world) about the Internet:

1 make the Internet into the primary communication medium

2 train people who don't know how to use it

3 change all the institutions to make them web-compatible

Agreed - though I was sitting next to him and he could not stop accessing Twitter on computer/smartphone throughout others' talks (which is against TED rules) so he may be a little hooked on this stuff!

Mallika Sarabhai, Dancer, actor, activist

Absolutely brilliant combination of dance, acting, poetry and political message - of woman moving into her full power and glory.

Zainab Salbi, Activitst and social entrepreneur

Quote: "War is not about sound; it's about the silence of humanity." Women understand war as well as men - if not better, since they are so often victims of it and they are primary in the healing from it, often the only way hatred can be stopped from cycling through the generations through their good influence on their children. So why are women excluded from peace negotiations? We must support women if we are to have peace.

And that's it. 700 semi-conscious TEDsters with fried brains file out to go punting and say goodbye for another year. It's been a fine TED for me: some highs and lows as always, and much to absorb over the coming days and weeks. For me right now, the mushroom replacement for styrofoam, the luminous Elif Shafak, the inspiring Jessican Jackley and Sugata Mitra and the thought-controlled computer were the standouts among many great talks.

Now to process dozens and dozens of business cards... if only there were an iPhone app to take pictures of them and get them straight into Contacts. I gather Google has such a thing on the Android so maybe it won't be long.

So long to TED until July 2011.

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TED session 11: The Tiny Blue Dot

2010-07-17T11:36:00.001+01:00

Good news - Caroline's superb hurdy-gurdy music (from TED-U) is now linked on the TED blog here. Get some!

This session is about the planet.

Johan Rockström, Sustainability expert

There are nine 'planetary boundaries' and we have already transgressed three of them (climate change, nitrogen, species extinction). We are squeezing the planet in four dimensions at once: human growth, climate, ecosystems and the element of surprise. Slowing growth is not going to be enough: we are going to have to bend the curves downwards. A shocking stat: 25% of rivers now don't reach the ocean because we are taking the water.

Jason Clay, Market transformer

Great quote: "You can't wake a person who'e pretending to be asleep." Population x consumption must = planetary resources, and it does not. The average American consumers 43x as much as the average African. the average European cat has a bigger environmental footprint than the average African. The key to cutting our footprint is trade. 100 companies control 25% of the trade so it's realistic to change their behaviour to using sustainable resources. 40 have signed up to this already, 40 more are about to. This make sustainability a pre-competitive issue - asking consumers to choose green will just not work.

Rachel Sussman, Artist and photographer

Rachel photographs the world's oldest living things. A 7,000 year old tree in Japan; clone aspen that's 80,000 years old; Siberian actinobacteria that are 600,000 years old. Fascinating.

Rachel Armstrong, Senior TED Fellow

We can produce technology that produces positive outputs instead of waste products - for example buildings that absorb CO2.

Ze Frank, Humourist and web artist

A brilliant and very funny talk as always - I loved the mashups/community created music he makes.

Dimitar Sasselov, Astronomer (and hear my AudioBoo interview with him here)

The Kepler telescope has just gone into orbit and Dimitar gives us a sneak preview of the results. They have found more than 140 Earth-sized planets already, so the conclusion is that our galaxy is rich in them - probably 100 million in total. Within a year we'll have identified Earth-type planets. The other end of the bridge is synthetic biology on Earth.

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TED session 10: Who's The Teacher?

2010-07-17T11:14:00.001+01:00

Sugata Mitra, Education researcher

This was a wonderful TED talk from a charming, funny and brilliant man with a great heart. Children learn to use computers on their, given space (and no teacher) - anywhere in the world. Arthur C Clarke: "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be." Groups of children (ideally pods of 3-4 on each computer) can learn without being taught to navigate the Internet and achieve defined educational objectives. Sugata shows many inspiring examples of this in India, the UK and Italy. He is setting up SOLEs (self organising learning environments) around the world, with a Granny Cloud (!!!) because he's found that children learn especially well when they can check in with a granny figure. There aqre hundreds of grannies connecting virtually with children all over the world - wonderful stuff that rewards both ends of the link! He should run the world's educational systems IMHO!

Conrad Wolfram, Mathematician

We must change the teaching of mathematics. Why do we obsess about grinding children into tedium by teaching only the boring bit (computation) when they will never use it in life - we have machines for that. The interest bits are formulating the right question, turning it into a mathematical formulation, and then interpreting the results. Computation is a necessary evil, not the 'basics'. Do you need to understand mechanics to drive a car well? Teach children to feel the mathematics. The first country to do this well will have a big advantage.

Tom Chatfield, Gaming Theorist

We can learn lessons from computer game design that we can apply in many areas of life. For example, game designers are brilliant at motivation through exactly the right mix of risk and reward - make a game too easy and people are bored, too hard they give up. Some transferable technologies: performance bars, multiple long/short term goals, rewards for effort (as well as for achievement), rapid frequent and clear feedback, an element of uncertainty, bursts of enhanced attention, peer cooperation in self-created groups.

Chris Anderson, TED curator

We are in a period of crowd accelerated innovation, courtesy mainly of YouTube. 90% of the world's Internet traffic will be video - the most natural form of communication between human beings, as it combines sound (voice), gesture and facial expression, as well as showing action. Groups of expert learners are forming and sharing and setting new standards in all sorts of activities, from skateboarding and unicycling to dance and poetry. TED is part of this, spreading ideas faster in video that text ever could. we had a revolution with Gutenberg, and this is just as big, possibly even bigger as the whole population become net contributors instead of passive consumers. Absolutely Chris - and it's strangely satisfying to see him go through what so many TED talkers have!

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TED session 9: The Unknown Brain

2010-07-17T10:47:00.001+01:00

Gero Miesenböck, Optogeneticist

We don't understand the brain's code and we won't get there any time soon by trying to decode millions of neural impulses. Optogenetics uses flashes of light to change behaviour, and aims to understand the resulting brain activity. Our brains control an actor (controls actions) and a critic (learns and interprets). Using light, Gero has identified the brain region of the critic in flies and believes we can in humans.

Herbert Watzke, Computational neuroscientist

We aren't omnivores - we are coctivores: animals that eat cooked food. "I cook therefore I am." We perceive five tastes, of which three are acquisitive (sweet, umami and salt) helping us to find nutritious food, and two are protective (sour and bitter), warning us of dangerour food. We have two complete brains! Our gut has a brain connected with the limbic system that manages our complex gut - 400 sqm in area, 14 m long, with 500 million nerve cells, 20 types of neurone in the gut wall. The gut brain is autonomous, manages chemical/mechanical sensing, is responsible for feelings of satiation and hunger, and controls muscle movements.

Stefano Mancuso, Plant neurobiologist

Why were there no plants on the ark?! Plants are undervalued: they have intelligence - they sleep, they even play. Their intelligence is in their neural networks, in their roots. Each root has a few hundred cells that act like neurones, and a simple plant like rye has 14 million roots... so under the plant is a sophisticated neural network like the Internet. In future we should build plant robots (so we have androids, animaloids and plantoids) where we want to do the things plants do well.

Sebastian Seung, Computational neuroscientist

A true rockstar scientist! Each of us is a connectome - the map of all the connections between all our neurones. We have 100 billion neurones. Are memories, personality, identity held in the complexity of the connectome? Neurones look like trees, and where they touch is a synapse. The map of synapses changes all the time: just thinking probably changes your connectome. The length of the wiring in our brain is millions of miles!

Fascinating session.

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Prof Dimitar Sasselov at #TED: small planets are abundant

2010-07-16T10:32:00.001+01:00

Listen!

via AudioBoo

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TED session 8: Adventures in Fairness

2010-07-16T00:45:00.001+01:00

Tim Jackson, Sustainability Scholar

A terrific talk. We can be prosperous without growth, the endless pursuit of novelty. Driven by anxiety (Adam Smith's 'life without shame' is what we seek) we spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about! But there is another way - like the Ecosia search engine, which saves rain forest (please use or install this!) - business built on common citizenship. A new definition of prosperity is: 'flourishing as human beings within the ecological limitations of a finite planet.'

Jessica Jackley, Microlender

This slip of a girl went to Africa, realised people needed loans to kick start their businesses, came back and launched a website called Kiva to connect Western lenders with third world entrepreneurs. That was five years ago. Last year the site flowed $150 million in loans from 200 countries, crucially connecting the lenders with the businesses - they get monthly updates - and creating dialogue and relationship. Moving, inspiring and humbling. A standing ovation for this one.

Auret van Heerden, Labour Rights Activist

This man has been imprisoned and tortured for his principles, and his integrity shines through. Chocolate needs some image therapy after this TED: not only is it full of bugs, but 80% of the cocoa using child labour in Cote d'Ivoire. Worse example: the Uzbek government shockingly closes all the schools for the cotton harvest each year and the children a forced wot work in the fields. Regulatory systems don't work: the only thing that does is the contract with the Western customer company, with checking. Auret is making this happen: 4,000 companies have signed up to be part of his Fair Labor Association.

Peter Eigen, Founder - Transparency International

A great man, responsible for turning back the tide of corruption (western companies bribing corrupt third world officials). $1 trillion was paid each year in bribes, until he perdsuaded the companies in Germany to stop bribing all at the same time. (It was tax deductible until then.) He has created the Corruption Perceptions Index, which reveals the worst offenders. Transparency International is taking on oil, gas, mining - and creatin real openness.

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TED session 7: Creatures Great And Small

2010-07-16T00:09:00.001+01:00

Bleary eyed but game we queue from 0800 and this is what we get to enjoy...

Adrian Dolby, Organic Farmer

I breakfasted with Adrian yesterday and what a charming man - he runs a huge organic farm in the Malvern Hills called Barrington Park Estate Farms. His talk is excellent. Half a kilo of healthy soil ("the ecstatic skin of the Earth") contains 300,000 million bacteria and 10km of fungus. Organic farming works if skilled rotation is used, based on clover (naturally created nitrates). What about weeds? "We stopped calling them weeds and started calling them biodiversity" - and they found that unweakened by chemicals the crops were able to defend themselves against attacks. Very hopeful.

Christien Meindertsma, Artist

A brilliant TED talk. CM followed one pig through the whole process to see if it was all used after slaughter and if so how. We meet pig early in the morning in soap and toothpaste, then frequently through the day in low fat spread, concrete, train brakes, desserts, fine bone china, paint, sandpaper, beer, wine, fruit juice, collagen and bullets. Altogether 185 products, and it is all used up. Christien says we should be treating pigs like kings.

Thomas Dolby, Electronic Music Pioneer (see my AudioBoo with Thomas here and here)

A superb set from Thomas and hid band featuring three songs from his forthcoming album Amerikana, all in American roots style but with a British twist. I was beaming all the way through, especially in Toad Lickers (!). Great playing and a supreme merger between wide-eyed roots and ironic humour. Good to have him back.

Toni Frohoff, Wildlife Biologist

2010-07-15T01:19:00.001+01:00

Last session of a packed day and we're off again...

Miwa Matreyek, Multimedia Artist (and hear my AudioBoo with Miwa here)

One of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen. I'm not sure the web will do Miwa justice, but click the link on her name to take a look. Her performance on the TED stage combines shadow play with computer graphics, art and music in a wonderful phantasmagoria which really takes the breath away. Stunning.

Neil Gershenfeld, Physicist, Fabrication Pioneer

Some of this one goes right over my head but here's what I get... the universe runs at the same speed regardless of how much of it you have, unlike computers. NG is working on programs that become evolving shapes like biology and ultimately real materials. He distinguishes four stages of technology:

1 computers make machines

2 machines make machines

3 codes make materials

4 programs make materials - at which stage we are growing our technology. This will be the Star Trek replicator, where we can create any material. Anybody will be able to make anything anywhere. Blimey. There was more here but if you want to understand it you'll have to wait for it on TED.com because my brain fried at this point.

Tan Le, Enterpreneur

This one is massive. The best demo since wireless electricity last year. We actually see my mate Evan Grant controlling a computer by thought alone! Tan Le's simple 14-node wireless brain-scanning headset called Emotiv and powerful algorithm that 'unfolds' the brain to locate neuro impulses make so much possible: Evan and I have been discussing the implications ever since... how about composing and modulating music with thought alone? Or altering your house environment automatically to ameliorate mood (eg for depressives or those with anger issues). Wow. I now believe we will be controlling our technology via thoughts within ten years. Incidentally, a fact to remember: we have 170km of axons in our heads!

Eben Bayer, Green designer

One cubic metre of styrofoam (filthy stuff) uses the energy equivalent of 1.5 litres of petrol. 25% of the world's landfill is this one material and it will take thousands of years to disappear. Eben has come up with a mushroom-based alternative: he grows this stuff into moulds and in fuve days it's formed perfect styrofoam replacements for packaging - which you just throw onto the garden when you unpack the TV or whatever. They improve your soil as they are absorbed - and they cost little to make as they grow themselves. Absolutely brilliant, and possibly the most important thing so far at TED.

David Bismark

Election can be verifiable and still secret using his ingenious form and a web-based system. Nobody else can know your vote and yet you can check it was recorded so it can't get 'lost'. Let's get this installed right now world wide.

Emily Pilloton, Humanitarian design activist

A pleasing story of reclaiming Bertie County through design.

This session contains some key talks - and the TED miasma has started. I did manage to AudioBoo Bill Liao, who is running a tree-planting programme called Weforest that just might save the planet. Listen here.

Tonight was dinner with TEDx organisers and Fellows - great fun but very noisy! May not remember who I am in the next blog. And so to bed for five hours before the next day...

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TED session 5: Healthier Together

2010-07-15T00:44:00.001+01:00

Inge Missmahl, Analytical psychologist

In a tour de force of compassionate activism, Inge shows how she has single-handedly made a massive difference in Afghanistan by introducing psychosocial counselling for a population of whom up to 80% are clinically depressed. The average age in the country is 17, and everyone has been damaged by war: they need to feel heard. Inge's clinics are now part of the public health strategy and they are transforming thousands of lives a year. Humbling.

Annie Lennox, Singer

Yesterday Annie was completely expressed in her singing. Today she's speaking and the light is not on in the same way, though the cause is just, noble and needs all of our support: her Sing initiative is supporting Treatment Action Campaign, which aims to eliminate mother-child AIDS transmission by 2015.

Mitchell Besser, AIDS fighter

There are 300,000 HIV-positive mothers, the vast majority in Sub-Saharan Africa. Untreated, 40% will give birth to HIV+ve babies. But with Preventing Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT), 98% of babies will be healthy. Africa has 24% of thew world's AIDS cases, but just 3% of the medical professionals, so a new model is being used - based on Western 12-step recovery as I found when I spoke to Mitchell. It uses 'mother mentors' - HIV positive women who are living full lives and have given birth to healthy babies - as examples of success and guides who take the strain off the overworked nurses. With 1,600 mentor mothers this system is now treating 230,000 women a month! Fantastic.

Karsu Dönmez, Singer

Another excellent southern Mediterranean woman singer, this time from Turkey (via Netherlands) and very young. A strong voice and a rousing Turkish folk tune to close.

Arthur Potts Dawson, Green Chef

Aims to reduce waste in restaurants ("the most wasteful industry on earth - every calorie of food consumed uses 10 calories to create"). His London restaurants are zero carbon, and have their own ecosystem with all waste recycled and used in the garden. New supermarket 'The People's Supermarket' is in the same vein. Worthy, but looking at the photos I wouldn't be able to spend more than five minutes in his Acorn House restaurant because it must be unbearably loud - no sound absorbing surface at all in sight.

John Hardy, Designer, Educator

Built the Green School in Bali. I was not alone in not getting this one... 160 children from 25 countries pay $10,000 a year and have a great education in a lovely place which was built with great passion (and presumably at great cost) from bamboo. I get his joy and commitment but how is this scaleable to East LA, Detroit or Brixton?

There's always one session that doesn't click for me and this was it... but without valleys you can't have mountains, and we have already had two classics.

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TED session 4: Irrational Choices

2010-07-15T00:06:00.001+01:00

Sheena Iyengar Psycho-economist

The practice of choice is very different depending on culture. The American model (have it your way) is not necessarily best, though Americans blithely assume that everyone in the world only needs to adopt it to be happy. Three underlying assumptions, each of which can be challenged.

1 - we should make our own choices (but it can be better to defer to family or community)

2 - more options lead to better choices (but Eastern Europeans don't see Coke v Pepsi as a choice - both are just soda - and they see lots of choices as stress-inducing and wasteful)

3 - never say no to choice (but US parents who are given the choice to switch off life support for their baby suffer guilt and depression for years, whereas French parents (where the doctor makes the choice) recovery and assimilate much faster).

The benefits of choice are culturally and situationally sensitive.

Laurie Santos Cognitive psychologist

We make repeating mistakes in markets because we think relatively and we are loss-averse - hence we hang on in bear markets. Monkeys in tests do the same. We need to recognise this flaw in our design and consciously compensate, because these errors are predictable and immune to feedback.

Short talk from Mark Elliott, pastor - look for miracles and life is richer. Quotes Einstein: there are two ways to live: either as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is a miracle. I know which I prefer.

Lewis Pugh Coldwater Swimmer

Lewis is back to update us. Not content with his awe-inspiring 1km swim at the North Pole, he climbed half way up Everest and swam at 5,300m altitude in a lake that shouldn't be there - it was left behind by retreating glaciers. "There is nothing more powerful than a made up mind." Clearly true as he survives near death and completes the swim, learning that past experience is no reliable guide to the present as he has to swim very slowly due to lack of oxygen. Respect.

Jamil Abu-Wardeh Comedy Impresario

The man who birthed Muslim stand up comedy tells us how he did it - and what it is achieving. With Axis of Evil - an Iranian, a Palestinian and an Egyptian - touring the world (including the Arab world), comedy festivals in Saudi Arabia and even a women-only comedy festival, comedy is changing the narrative and 'righting writing wrongs'. Inspiring.

Maz Jobrani Comedian

We get a taste of the real thing as Maz (of the Axis of Evil) runs through some outstanding material that so clearly makes nonsense of stereotypes and creates empathy, as well as being downright hilarious.

A solid session. And so to lunch.

Posted via email from Julian Treasure's posterous

TED session 3: Found In Translation

2010-07-14T23:36:00.001+01:00

Here goes for the first of the two full days of TED - four sessions each day, starting at 0830. This is the meat!

Ethan Zuckerman, Blogger, digital visionary (also hear my AudioBoo with Ethan here)

We are prone to silo ourselves in filter bubbles - hence not many Americans know that Twitter is heavily Brazilian and African American. Just search on some unfamiliar words to explore. Digital is actually getting less global - 35% of US news was global in the 1970s, compared with just 12% today, while 95% of online news readership is domestic. We live in imaginary cosmopolitanism, following the wisdom of the flock and missing huge swathes of the wen. For example, who is translating the Chinese content generated by 400m users? We need to engineer serendipity, automate translation and cultivate xenophiles.

Elif Shafak, Novelist (also hear my AudioBoo with Elif here)

This was the standout talk of TED so far for me. Elif is a luminous, powerful and beautiful woman, speaking flawless prose (in a second language!) of great beauty and calm presence. She says: to destroy anything, put it in a circle and it will die. Thus living in communities of like-minded people inevitably leads to stereotyping and decay. Labels endanger our freedom of imagination. Fiction is powerful and can be a force for empathy, but it is itself and not a means to an end: as Chekov said, art's job is to correctly pose the question, not find the solution. Story is crucial, because changing the narrative changes the reality.

David McCandless, Data journalist

Three bulls eyes in a row now as McCandless shows the power of simple, well-designed data visualisation (which is becoming a real theme of this TED). Data is the new oil? No, he says: data is the new soil, fertile and versatile. Some brilliant charts - like this billiondollargram. Must buy his book, which contains many more.

Mor Karbasi, Singer-songwriter

Four in a row - could this be a vintage session like last night? Mor has a ravishing voice, combining Israeli, Ladino and Spanish influences into a potent mix heady with Moorish history, flamenco and Spanish passion. Simply superb. Go out and buy her music.

Fourth up is Nic Marks, proposing that wealth is no measure of happiness. So why don't we measure happiness instead of GDP (which, as Kennedy said, measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile). Marks has produced a happiness index to help us focus on what really matters (as opposed to more stuff) - and Costa Rica is the happiest place on Earth! Five daily practices to achieve a happy life:

Time for bed - up at 4am for flight back to London after tdc10!

Joined up blogging

2010-05-27T21:54:00.001+01:00

After a mind blowing day at Thinking Digital (#tdc10) I have been transformed in my blogging by Christian Payne, or documentally as he's far better known in the blogosphere. A truly lovely bloke, he is a huge Audioboo fan, and by showing me the ropes has helped me finally to break through my boo block and start audio blogging. The boos can be short snippets or go right up to full podcasts, and can even be posted to iTunes. Documentally also introduced me to Posterous, and I have now reviewed and shaken up my whole blogging strategy. Here is how it looks as of this evening:

The large arrows are inputs. I will primarily use Audioboo (for sound of course), Tweetdeck for text tweets, and Posterous for pics and blogs. I have turned off outputs from all the entities in the central column. i can post straight into any of them individually of course. I'll use ping.fm mainly for microblogs because I've got the widget on my Google homepage and it makes that very fast.

I still have to set up an archive for tweets and boos - never thought of that until documentally mentioned it. I will probably set up a second Tumblr for that.
Ok, now all that remains is to test - so this is my first Posterous blog - and send!

Posted via email from juliantreasure's posterous

2010-05-27T21:51:00.001+01:00

Have redesigned my tweeting, blogging and posting setup thanks to @documentally. Typing this into ping.fm widget on my iGoogle homepage.

Untitled

2010-05-27T10:22:00.001+01:00

Thanks to @stephenfry for introducing me to pownum via Twitter. This is a great initiative - I will start rating places on their soundscapes. I hope many more will do so too. Check it out at http://www.pownum.com/what-is-pownum/ .

Posted via email from juliantreasure's posterous

#ThinkingDigital 2010 begins

2010-05-26T00:56:00.000+01:00

Up here in Newcastle for the next few days for the excellent Thinking Digital conference, where I am speaking tomorrow. I plan to blog in the evenings with some news and views on what looks a fascinating lineup. Met fellow speaker Robert Lang (world origami expert) at the superb speakers' dinner - what a lovely man. We share the stage tomorrow afternoon in a session entitled 'The Evangelists'. And great to reconnect with fellow TED-U prof Tom Wujec, who speaks on Thursday in the 'Business 3.0' session.

What I can report so far is that Newcastle is spectacular. The Rogers-designed Sage building is amazing - can't wait to enter it tomorrow. The food at SIX, on top of the BALTIC, was stunning, as were the views as the sun set (dusk at 2200!) - highly recommended.

My presentation is finally ready after endless tweaks, so it's sleep now and then day one to look forward to.

Speaking out

2010-04-15T10:25:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the long silence here. It's been a frantic start to the year with lots of new business happening at The Sound Agency. The market for audio branding (and for sensory marketing in general) is really starting to move this year. We have some fabulous new projects cooking, which should add powerfully to the case studies we already have of the benefits of designed sound for retail (BP and Glasgow Airport), hospitality (InterContinental Hotel London Park Lane) and banking (Helm Bank, Colombia) among others...

One indication of this increasing momentum in the market is that I'm preparing for a summer of public speaking. It starts in May when I'm speaking at the prestigious Arabian Travel Market in Dubai on sensory hotels (May 5) and then I'm very excited to be one of three speakers at the Wealth From Marketing event in Dublin (May 14) and London (May 15), where I'll be sharing some tools and techniques to increase sales and brand value with BrandSound™. At this event I'll also be launching my three-day Sound Business seminar, which will take place in London this Autumn. Then at the end of May I speak at Thinking Digital in Newcastle, a vibrant TED-like event that should be fascinating.

In June I'm speaking at the European Marketing Academy conference in Copenhagen (June 3) where the whole theme of the conference is sensory marketing, and then at the annual marketing conference of the International Council of Shopping Centres in Lisbon (June 15), where I'll be talking about the effects of sound on retail sales.

Finally, and on a delightfully different tack, I'm speaking with my friend and colleague Simon Harrop of BRAND sense Agency at the annual seminar of the Veterinary Marketing Association, at the Chartered Institute of Marketing in Cookham, Surrey (November 18).

The marketers of the world are definitely opening their ears to our message that sound affects everyone all the time. These are all valuable milestones in my mission to make the world sound better, by communicating the message that better sounding brands achieve better results. It's an exciting year in prospect. I hope to see you somewhere on the road!

The power of sound

2009-10-20T18:41:00.004+01:00

I'm getting lots of fascinating connections since my TED talk went live. One I want to share straight away is an excellent online presentation called The Power Of Sound, created by Bob McCurdy at Clear Channel Radio Sales. It was designed to sell radio as a medium, but it has lots of interest to anyone who cares about sound and how it affects people - and it's beautifully put together with plenty of sound. You can see it for yourself here. Congratulations to Bob and his team for a great job. The message is spreading! Sound matters.

Talking sound

2009-10-16T19:14:00.003+01:00

I'm delighted and thrilled to see my short TED talk go up on the TED website. I had a very warm response from many people to the talk over the four days at TEDGlobal in Oxford - four days which were a huge highlight of my year - and already there are some great comments on the TED Facebook page. Five minutes is a short time to condense a lot of material into, but I managed not to gabble! I'm now looking forward to a longer stint at the upcoming Audio Branding Congress in Hamburg next month.

The human voice is the most powerful sound on the planet, and I hope to continue to use mine to good effect to transform the sound of the world's business, and thus improve the sound of the world for all of us.

Your incredible ears

2009-08-18T01:23:00.002+01:00

We live so much in our eyes these days that we underestimate and undervalue our most potent and primal sense: hearing. Here are three reasons we should place hearing back on the throne as king of our senses.

1 Hearing is first in time.
Hearing develops at just 12 weeks after conception according to French audiologist Alfred Tomatis. Long before we have ears, we are hearing our mother's heartbeat through every cell. (Even as adults we still hear through our whole bodies. Ears are just the specialists: we sense sound through our skin, bone and muscle, which is how the profoundly deaf world-renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie can hear with no ear function at all.) The cochlea, the engine of the ear, reaches adult size and full functionality just 18 weeks after conception, long before the eyes are effective. From that point we hear very well, and learn to distinguish our mother's voice - as well as the reassuring three-time beat of her heart (lub-dub-pause). Hearing is the first sense we create, and according to numerous near-death accounts it's also the last sense to dim when we die.

Interestingly sound comes first not just for human beings but also for the universe. In the first 380,000 years of its existence the universe was an opaque plasma of photons, electrons and baryons. There was no light because matter and energy were one, and all the photons were bound up in the plasma; it wasn’t until the moment of decoupling when the expanding plasma cloud cooled to 3,000 degrees Kelvin that the photons were released and light came into existence. But there was certainly sound before decoupling because the plasma was a medium and there was plenty of vibration going on as the universe expanded unimaginably quickly, but not evenly. Had humans been able to survive there and listen, they would have heard the sound of the universe being born long before light existed.

Fascinating then that many of the world's spiritual traditions have sound coming before light at the birth of our world. The Old Testament has the heavens and the earth formless, empty and dark with the spirit of God hovering (alternative translation: vibrating) over them – and only then does God say: “Let there be light.” The New Testament says: “In the beginning was the word.” The Hindus say “Nada Brahma”, one meaning of which is “the world is sound.” The mystics of Islam, the Sufis, say that all form manifests from sound. Looking further afield, the degree of consistency becomes quite impressive, with sound being placed at the centre of creation by religious traditions from all corners of the globe including Aztec, Inuit, Persian, Indian, Malayan, Ancient Egyptian, Polynesian, Japanese, Chinese, Balinese, Tibetan and Ancient Greek.

While considering sound and time we may also reflect that the two are intrinsically linked in our hearing and our listening. Music, for example, has been called 'art in time'. Only in time can it exist. Hermann Hesse wrote: "Music is time made aesthetically perceptible." There is no auditory equivalent of a photograph; a sound in an instant is meaningless, so there's no way of compressing sound from four dimensions (three spatial plus one temporal) to two. Sound always requires time. This is true also of language, which further requires memory to have meaning. You understand my language by remembering what I just said and placing my words in that context. Vision, by comparison is inherently instant.

2 Hearing is first in space.
Sight is a directed sense. With our binocular vision we see in a cone in front of us, approximately 180 degrees wide and 120 tall. Hearing, by comparison, is completely spherical. Anyone can place a sound precisely in three dimensions. We have no 'deaf spot' because hearing is and always has been our primary warning sense, and because it is vital to our spatial awareness. These are the reasons that our hearing is on duty from before birth to death, with no rest at all. We close our eyes to sleep, but our hearing carries on working: we have no earlids because even while we are dreaming our hearing constantly scans and analyses the sounds around us. We're all familiar with waking suddenly because some small unfamiliar sound has triggered our lizard brain to alert us.

We discern a great deal about any space in a second or two from its acoustics: with eyes shut we can perceive walls and other solid objects from the tiniest sonic reflections. With practice this skill can approach that of bats or dolphins - as in the case of Ben Underwood, the blind boy in California who navigates with clicks.

Of course our ears are also our organs of balance, telling us which way is up at all times. Hearing and space are intimately and permanently connected in a potent and authentic perceptive process. This is why there are few aural illusions, and why that phrase is unknown - whereas 'optical illusion' is so familiar.

3 Hearing is first in sensitivity
We see a spectrum of vibration from about 390 nanometres (violet) to about 780 nanometres (red). (A nanometre is one thousand-millionth of a metre.) The frequencies of these tiny waves range from about 380 terahertz (red) to about 770 terahertz (violet). (Tera = an old fashioned billion, ie a million million. Hertz = one cycle per second.) An octave is a doubling of frequency, so our visual range is surprisingly just one octave! By comparison a young human being with good hearing can hear from about 16 Hz to about 16 KHz, which is ten octaves. Our auditory range is thus ten times greater than our visual in terms of relative frequency.

Human hearing can perceive a huge range of intensity, with a dynamic range of 130 dB. A sound that causes permanent damage with short exposure (like a train horn at one metre, which at 130 dB will perforate eardrums) has a thousand million times more power than the quietest sound the average healthy person can hear (a mosquito flying away at 3 metres, or 0 dB). In contrast, the eye’s dynamic range (which can also be measured in dB) is just 90 dB. The decibel scale is logarithmic, so in terms of intensity our aural range is 10,000 times greater than our visual.

According to Richard Norton at the University of Chicago the average human ear can distinguish 1,378 'just noticeable differences' in tone. By comparison we can distinguish just 150 hues of colour. On this measure hearing is almost 100 times as sensitive.

That's not all. Even the most tone deaf humans can spot an octave, and many people with good pitch can identify a given note. Our hearing is not just absolute: unlike vision, it also detects and measures relative values. We have no idea when two colours are an octave apart, but we know exactly when two tones are. It may be that the inherent relationship between number and tone helped to give us the foundations of mathematical understanding as we started to understand vibration and fashion musical instruments, especially stringed ones. (Every note in the harmonic series is achieved through selecting perfect proportions of a vibrating string's length.)

This is the amazing sense which is being thoughtlessly assailed by increasing urban noise (doubling every twenty years according to Murray Schafer) and maimed by increasing headphone abuse (our current teenage generation may be the first to enter the workforce with a majority already suffering from serious hearing damage).

I believe that if we rediscover how astounding this precious sense is, we will start to value and nurture it, and the world will become a very different place. This is my passion and why I'm doing what I'm doing. I invite you to join me in a campaign to save our hearing.

TED Day 4

2009-07-24T18:41:00.001+01:00

TED is over and I am already in withdrawal. There's a well-documented reaction called TEDcrash that can accompany re-entry into normal life after four days of immersion in amazing ideas and even more amazing people. I have met more than 90 people in the last five days; each conversation has been at the very least interesting, and at most completely mind-blowing.

Here's a summary of the two sessions from this last Friday morning:

Session 11: Cities Past and Future
Eric Sanderson gave one of TED's most beautiful sessions on the Mannahatta project, which has mapped and cross-referenced every geographical feature and species of flora and fauna of Mannhattan going back to 1600 and culminating in a gorgeous virtual reality view; Constanza Cerruti showed the value of archaeology at high altitude (over 6,000m high!); Carolyn Steel was inspiring, forthright and downright fascinating on how cities were shaped by their food supplies up to the rail and road revolution and how important it is to reforge that broken relationship now; Bjarke Ingels was totally inspiring and also very funny in showing the real future of architecture - jaw-dropping designs (wish I'd known when I had breakfast with him!) that proved sustainability doesn't have to be boring; and Magnus Larsson showed how sand plus a special bacterium equals instant sandstone, which could create a wall of tress and dwellings across Africa to hold back the desert. One of my favourtie sessions, this one - fascintaing, inspiring and amazing in equal measure.

Session 12: Enquire Within
Dan Pink brilliantly and passionately exposed the massive business fallacy that extrinsic motivators, otherwise known as carrots and sticks, improve performance (disproved conclusively by science - they work for simple mechanical tasks but if there is even a hint of creativity involved they actually degrade performance by narrowing focus!) and showed that what work are intrinsic motivators (autonomy, mastery and purpose); Itay Talgam was absolutely brilliant in analysing the essential styles of his fellow great conductors and received a standing ovation; Daniel Birnbaum gave us a personal tour of the Venice Biennale exhibition; Cappucin Friar Br Paulus Terwitte was passionate but sadly to me largely incomprehensible due to langauge limitations; and Imogen Heap returned for a triumphant encore which involved a hang, her voice and a lot of audience participation. She is a gem.

And that's it for another year... now I need at least a week to process the connections! I have met incredible people, my brain is on fire and my faith in humanity has been restored - though not without a clear view of how scary our current challenges are. Thanks to Chris and the whole TED team for my best-ever TED experience. I've signed up for next year already - I wouldn't miss this for anything.

TED Day 3

2009-07-24T00:42:00.003+01:00

TED does funny things to your time perception. It seems to be going so fast - only two sessions left now - but at the same time it seems a lifetime ago that I did my TED-University talk on Tuesday.

Today was fabulous; here's a brief run-through.

Session 7 - Radical Development
Paul Romer proposed that we need some good rules for changing rules because we get stuck with useless old rules too often, and suggested transforming Guantalamo Bay into a Charter City to be Cuba's Hong Kong; Marc Koska demonstrated his safe syringe (plunger breaks after one use); Michael Pritchard showed his brilliant Lifesaver bottle that cleans filthy water (Chris Anderson bravely acted as on-stage guinea pig) and allows people to live where water is; William Kamkwamba inspired us all with his pure dedication in building windmills from scrap to power and irrigate his family home; Rob Hopkins brilliantly showed how we can adapt to the end of the oil age through the wonderful Transition Network (who knew that Lewes had its own currency?); IDEO boss Tim Brown berated the 'design priesthood' for thinking small and argued convincingly that design is really big if we start with humans, prototype fast, move from consumption to participation and ask the right questions.

Session 8 - In The Shadows
A dark and scary session. Taryn Simon showed her superb but unsettling photographs of forbidden or hidden places and of wrongly-convicted people; Misha Glenny gave a tour (de force) of his amazing McMafia book, scaring the pants off me (organised crime is 18% of global GDP!!); Ed Burtynsky showed photographs of man's effect on land; Loretta Napoleoni suggested that terrorism had indirectly caused the credit crunch (US flooded the market with bonds to fund the $7bn war on terror, so interest rates were artificially reduced to increase yields, leading to the sub-prime market); and former child soldier Emmanuel Jal rapped for peace and had the whole house dancing and in tears at the same time.

Session 9 - Revealing Energy
A highlight among highlights: the session started with the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra playing the Dr Who theme complete with live theramin. Priceless - though confusing to the non-Brits. Ross Lovegrove underwhelmed me with some rambling design projects (should have listened to Tim Brown); Nick Veasey showed his x-ray art; Steve Cowley predicted workable fusion soon; Eric Giler demonstrated wireless electricity (at last!! short range only but long enough to eliminate that spaghetti under the desk and remove the need for many of the 40 billion batteries we use and discard each year); Jason Soll showed some card flourishing - a new obsession on YouTube; and Bertrand Piccard was elegantly metaphorical about transglobal balloon flight and about his new venture to circumnavigate the world non-stop in a solar-powered plane (yes nights too).

Session 10 - Worldview Rethink
Parag Khanna proposed that more infrastructure like pipelines and railways will bring peace to the geopolitical map; Richard Bernstein described an astoundingly simple way for business to tackle poverty (create shares and give them to charity); the articulate Geoff Mulgan argued for a new social capitalism founded on care and relationships instead of consumption and credit; Michelle Borkin showed some superb interdisciplinary data visualisation; Rory Bremner was outstanding and very funny ("Sorry I missed Gordon Brown's job application yesterday..."); and Karen Armstrong updated us on her TED Prize wish, the Charter For Compassion, which is being launched late this year (wonderful!).

Bonus session
In the stunning Sheldonian Theatre we had an extraordinary performance of Felix's Machines, a witty talk by charming QI producer John Lloyd, some terrifying time-lapse photography of retreating glaciers by James Balog (any remaining climate change doubters can view similar here), and a beautiful talk by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that urged us not to have just one story about any person, country or group.

Only two sessions left tomorrow morning, then it's all over for another year. I have met 90 people, and they have all been fascinating. This has been a vintage TED, and I'm already registered for next year, which is selling fast. Now for some sleep...

TED Day 2

2009-07-23T01:36:00.003+01:00

I'm a TED host here, which gives me double permission to speak to anyone - actually just wearing a TED name badge is permission enough, but the Host tag has emboldened me to set aside all remnants of Britishness and just dive in. As a result I have met around 80 people in two days! Every one of them has been a delight. TED is all about connections - and the people connections are just as important as the idea connections. This has been a vintage TED for me in both respects and it's only halfway through.

The content in today's four sessions was astounding.

Session 3: Connected Consequences
Jonathan Zittrain reflected on altruism on the Internet (for example Wikipedia is 45 minutes from destruction at all times and the only thing protecting it is a thin line of volunteer geeks); Evgeny Morozov questioned whether the web brings freedome or new slavery (18% of US teenagers are addicted to it); Stefana Broadbent proposed that modern communication is re-establishing family and friend connection during working hours, which is the way things used to be before industrialisation; Aza Raskin showed a great Mozilla initiative in plain language granular applications called Ubiquity; Carlos Ulloa demonstrated amazing 3D video called Papervision; Rory Sutherland brought the house down with a hilarious talk on the invisible value of marketing; and Imogen Heap played a haunting, beautiful and very charming set.

Session 4: Nature's Challenge
Cary Fowler showed how a biodoversity storage facility in the Arctic may save us from famine; Janine Benyus inspired by asking the question "how would nature solve this?"; Mathieu Lehanneur showed a living room air filter and other strange designs; Matthew White gave us more brilliant euphonium; and Lewis Pugh brought gasps as he explained and showed how he swam for 20 minutes in freezing water at the North Pole to raise awareness of climate change - it took four months for the feeling to return to his hands.

Session 5: Hidden Algorithm
Beau Lotto showed amazong visual illusions to prove that context is everything; Rebecca Saxe shared the latest research about the RTPJ region of the brain which thinks about other people's minds; Henry Markram explained the modelling of a human neural column and predicted complete computer brain modelling within 10 years; James Geary explored metaphors; Manuel Lima reviewed the latest in visual complexity and data representation; and David Deutsch gave a searing and razor sharp definition of good and bad scientific method.

Session 6: Curious and Curiouser
Marcus de Sautoy spoke on symmetry; Garik Israelian explained how spectroscopy is spotting planets around stars and even whether they have plant life (he told me later that he believes 30-40% of all stars will be shown to have planets!); Candy Chan showed the benefits of neighbourhood communication techniques; 90-year-old Elaine Morgan got a standing ovation and left us all touched, moved and inspired by her fight to get the aquatic theory of human evolution accepted by the snooty academic establishment; and Sophie Hunger played a fine set with the best trombonist I've ever seen in her band.

What a day. A classic TED day. It seems a lifetime ago I gave my talk at TED-U. Must savour every moment because after tomorrow evening it'll be almost all over. Gordon Brown's talk is already up on the TED site. More will follow in the days to come.

TEDGlobal 2009 Day 1

2009-07-21T23:36:00.002+01:00

It's a joy to be back at TEDGlobal in Oxford, and what an excellent first day we've had. Where else do you see Stephen Fry (who was winging it, albeit in his usual witty and learned fashion), followed by a 17 year old euphonium genius called Matthew White, followed by Gordon Brown? The PM actually impressed me and everyone else I've spoken to with a passionate and articulate speech about the great opportunity we have at the confluence of global communication, global problems and a shared ethical basis for global action. I hope he speaks as eloquently in Copenhagen.

This morning (seems like a lifetime ago as I write - that's TED) I spoke about sound to a packed house of 270 as part of TED-University, where 24 TEDsters did a series of short talks - a mini TED which achieves the same effect of simultaneously stimulating and boggling the mind. I loved Rachel Armstrong on saving Venice with a protocell reef and Sam Martin on manspaces. Some kind comments about my talk, so a good start to the week.

Session 1: What we Know and Session 2: Seeing Is Believing
Sound has featured on the main stage already - not surprising given the conference theme of "The substance of things not seen". Evan Grant intrigued me with his talk on cymatics - the study of wave phenomena and specifically the patterns produced by sound waves, for example in sand grains on resonating metal plates or in water. Some of these patterns are identical to snowflakes, starfish and even living cells. There is something wonderful here... We also had Mark Johnson of Playing For Change with the YouTube-friendly video of Stand By Me. I would have been more in tune with this if he had credited 1 Giant Leap, whose modus operandi and video style he has clearly borrowed wholesale. I applaud the charitable intentions of his project, but in terms of musical worth the first 1GL album is out on its own. If you don't own it, go straight to Amazon and get yourself a copy of the DVD. It is truly inspiring.

We also had James Geary juggling (literally) as he advocated aphorisms (my favourite: no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible); Andrea Ghez making supermassive black holes intelligible and exciting; Willard Wigan showing his extraordinary nanosculptures (the Statue of Liberty in the eye of a needle!); Steve Truglia planing a parachute jump from 120,000 feet; and a wonderfully urbane and intelligent talk by Alain de Botton on the myth of success and the devastating effects of envy.

Just another standard day at TED. I have met upwards of 70 fascinating people so far - but that's just 10% of the number here. Only three days left...

Tennis can damage your hearing

2009-06-23T15:29:00.001+01:00

As Wimbledon calls ‘Play’ this year, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) is considering whether to make “noise hindrance” part of its code of conduct.

The issue of noise in tennis matches has been championed by Martina Navratilova who says: "Grunting, screeching, shrieking - I call it cheating and it’s got to stop. I started having issues with it when I was playing Monica Seles back in the early 1990s. She was one of the first, and I didn’t like it one bit. It affected my game because to me it is important to hear the ball hit the racquet. Rules must be changed: players must be warned. If they don’t stop, they must have points deducted”.

Maria Sharapova has thus far held the crown as the loudest player in the post-Seles era. However there is a new kid on the block who seems to have (literally) taken the practice to a whole new level. In the recent French Open, Aravane Rezai complained to the umpire about the shrieks coming from 16-year-old player Michelle Larcher de Brito, who has now been given a wildcard into Wimbledon, much to the joy of the British media. It's not just the level of her cries, it’s also the length of them that is causing concern. Tennis officials are now considering a proposal to make noise hindrance part of the International Tennis Federation’s code of conduct, which could mean noisy players being muted permanently.

The response from the playing community has been that it is always been part of their game and that there should not be any restrictions on the release of energy. Larcher de Brito for example says "If they made a rule that you're not allowed to shriek or scream or grunt, it wouldn't be fair because it's part of the game. I'm 16, I'm still learning. Maybe I can eventually put it under control. I hope not because it comes from Monica Seles, it comes from Sharapova, it comes from really great players." Others, such as Nick Bollettieri who has produced Seles among others maintain that it is within the rules and nobody can say that loud players have cheated.

So here is the countdown of the five loudest players in modern tennis and their noise output (bear in mind that past 85 decibels is the point where your hearing can be damaged by continuous exposure and earplugs are recommended):

5. Venus Williams 85 decibels Equivalent to: A food blender, city traffic (from inside a car).
4. Serena Williams 88.9 decibels Equivalent to: A truck passing by at 10m or a farm tractor.
3. Monica Seles 93.2 decibels The inspiration for the famous Centre Court ‘gruntometer’. Equivalent to: an electric drill, a motorcycle at 25 ft, or a power mower.
2. Maria Sharipova 101 decibels Equvalent to: A jet flying over at 1000 ft, a typical house stereo at maximum volume, a table saw. A walkman at maximum level.
1. Michelle Larcher De Brito 109 decibels (apparently) Equivalent to: A night club on the dance floor, front row at a rock concert, a jet taking off, a car horn.

Surely this presents a great merchandising opportunity for this year’s Wimbledon along with the usual strawberries and cream – purple and green earplugs for those in the front rows.

The future of music

2009-03-10T10:37:00.005Z

I recently tweeted about a new book called Against Intellectual Monopoly by Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, who argue that the current laws on intellectual property rights, especially copyright and patent laws, are killing creativity and innovation. Using examples such as Napster, Disney and the pharmaceutical industry, Boldrin and Levine argue that there are other and better ways to reward people for their ideas or creations.

As a perfect case study we have the news that Google is switching off access to commercial music videos for UK users from March 16th because negotiations with the Performing Right Society (PRS) have broken down. PRS, which represents the record labels and some artists and negotiates prices for public performance of recorded music in the UK, wants Google to pay more because user numbers have grown; Google says PRS is overpricing. Without a PRS license, it's illegal for Google to share this content in the UK. The result is that the public loses access to the music - which means that everyone loses.

Then there's the launch of Spotify. Legal for private use, Spotify streams music at reasonable quality, completely free of charge and with no buffering. It contains hundreds of thousands of tracks from almost all the major labels, and is a joy to use. It's currently accessible only in Europe, and UK users are among the first to be able to sign up without being invited first. Spotify will never replace my own music because I prefer listening at full bandwidth: I use Apple Lossless codec (see my earlier post about compression). But a recent survey by Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, has shown that young people actually prefer the sharp, tinny sound of compressed MP3 to the richer sound of full quality audio. If this is true, Spotify and free streaming services like it are the future of music.

The challenge to the music industry is this: if all we need is one copy of a work on a server, streaming to millions of people simultaneously, where does the revenue come from?

So far the industry has attempted to transfer its product-based business model from selling physical units to selling digital units, in other words charging for downloads. The Battle of Napster and this latest PRS/Google conflict are encounters resulting from this effort. Whether you believe the industry is cleverly getting the last few pints from the cash cow before it finally dies, or you see the industry as King Canute refusing to acknowledge very wet feet, there is no doubt that this model is doomed. Digital recorded music will soon be consumed without being owned or paid for.

Value is based on scarcity, which is why the most enduring revenue stream for musicians is live performance. But there are limits to how many gigs an artist can play each year, to audience sizes, and to ticket prices. This revenue stream is simply not scaleable enough to replace product sales.

Another obvious revenue source is opening the band-brand conversation and securing sponsorship deals. This is growing fast and has some way to run. But again there are limits: many artists will have ethical issues about which brands they promote, and consumers will lose interest in artists who dissipate their own brands by selling out too obviously.

The third revenue stream is public performance of recorded work, where royalties apply - Internet broadcast, background music in public spaces like shops, sync rights for TV, film and advertising, and commercial radio plays. I have posted before about my belief that music is not the most appropriate sound for every public space, but I expect this revenue stream to continue - as long as the industry agents like PRS can get their act together and create a sensible and consistent pricing model. However in a world of free personal music, public performance royalties will become increasingly anachronistic, and in any case they will never amount to more than a tiny fraction of the money lost with the demise of product sales.

Fourth there is patronage, or commissioned work. The great musicians and artists of previous centuries has no copyright protection and no recordings or duplicates to sell. They were paid by patrons, and produced much of their work to commission. Expect to see a renaissance of the patronage model as copy sales dry up.

But it seems to me that the future business model for all artists must be driven by a revenue stream that has only just started to trickle so far: the monetisation of the relationship between the artist and the fan. In this model the record companies have little or no role to play at all. Artists have their own teams handling a database of fans, who all choose where they want to be on a relationship continuum that stretches all the way from a single free download to personal meetings with the artist.

As the fan chooses to move up the scale, buying an album, signing up for a newsletter, joining a tiered loyalty programme, getting exclusive merchandise, buying tickets for fanclub-only gigs, getting signed merchandise, being in direct communication with the artrist, and attending small-group private audiences or gigs, the annual subscription goes up accordingly. And the music, most of the time, is free.

This model applies some of the best lessons from business and marketing - relationship marketing, database marketing, disintermediation, customer-centric business, virtual business, atomic business, web 2.0 - and applies them to an industry which is all about relationship. The fans crave relationship with the artists. So far, record companies have simply been in the way of that. Radiohead and others have started to explore this new direct model; the new wave of artists who don't need expensive recording studios, large advances or teams of suits to manage their entourages will leapfrog these efforts in the coming months and years. Using social networking, and new musician-specific tools that are already becoming available (see Gen-Y Rock Stars for some of these resources), artists will create their own communities, and connect directly and openly with them.

Within a decade I believe the music will be free - and the money will be in carefully managed direct relationships. Relationship is where the value lies - and it can never be pirated.

Why did Muzak go bust?

2009-02-11T12:10:00.001Z

Some lessons about piped music - and a cautionary tale for the retail TV industry.

Muzak's filing for bankruptcy yesterday is no surprise. I flagged its mountain of imminently due loans several weeks ago on Twitter and socialmedian, and in the current financial meltdown it was going to be a miracle if an entertainment-based business found someone willing and able to refinance over $400m of debt. It's very sad for those who will lose their jobs, but it's also very interesting to look at the underlying reasons for the failure, especially in the light of the similar demise of DMX in 2005.

What's not working for these music pipers? Is it the nature of the service they offer, the malaise affecting the whole commercial music business, or the business model these companies have been operating? And are there any lessons to learn?

First, the nature of the service. I do have great reservations about mindless music as a global veneer. There is little independent research on whether people like it or not, so most of the numbers one sees are produced by interested parties: either Muzak and its competitors, or the music industry and its ambassadors such as the licensing agencies - in the UK that's PRS, PPL and MCPS. Those numbers are universally positive, giving the impression that music is great to have in the background everywhere, all the time. You and I both know that's not true.

There is one independent survey I know: it was carried out in the UK in 1998 by NOP for the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, and it was setting out to find out how piped music affects the deaf and hard of hearing, of whom there are 9 million in the UK - that's around one sixth of the population. The survey also interviewed the general public by way of comparison; a total of 1,002 people were interviewed, and interestingly the level of engagement and passion for the subject of the interviewees was judged to be exceptionally high. This is a hot topic with the public, and the results should make salutory reading for retailers. Let's start here:

34% of the general public finding piped music annoying
36% of the general public never notice piped music

This top line finding is fascinating. Assuming that the remaining 30% actively like piped music, what this says is that retailers are buying approval from 3 in 10 people at the expense of irritating over one third of their potential customers. I know of one retailer-specific study that found that four out of five people were turning around on the doorstep and not even entering the store because of the its music. Most retailers are entirely unaware of the sales they are losing because of this deflection effect, or because of severely reduced dwell time for people who dislike the music. Very few people complain about irritating music: they just vote with their feet and leave.

And these are just the conscious reactions to sound. The picture gets worse when you factor in the unconscious effects of music, which are the most important part. Sound's impact is like an iceberg: most of it happens at unconscious level, below the waterline. We have become so used to suppressing noise that we are unaware of the vast majority of the sound around us - but it still affects us all the time. In shops, even for people who say they like the music, the standard fare of upbeat pop music acts as a stimulant, speeding shoppers up and causing them to leave the store faster than they otherwise would. This is losing further sales because, as every retailer knows, the longer we are in a store, the more we spend.

So most piped music is reducing sales, both by upsetting and deflecting a third (or more) of customers, and by shifting the rest out of the store too quickly.

The demographics make this even more painful for any retailer aiming at the top of the market:

45% of 45-54 year olds find piped music annoying
21% of 15-24 year olds find piped music annoying
51% of people in social group AB find piped music annoying
26% of people in social group DE find piped music annoying
86% of hard of hearing people find piped music annoying

For shops targeting youth or social groups D and E, music may be a great choice. But the vast majority of the wealth is in the hands of the people who most hate piped music. For upmarket shops targeting the affluent, music upsets around half of their customers! For the deaf and hard of hearing, the disapproval is unsurprisingly almost universal: piped music makes it harder for them to communicate in an already noisy world. (It's also worth reminding ourselves that Western populations are ageing, and the incidence of hearing loss is growing fast too, largely as a result of headphone abuse by younger people - so these 10-year-old numbers probably already understate the problem.)

At least most of us can leave the store. Staff have to put up with the music all day, and unsurprisingly, according to a survey in 2007 by the UK Noise Association, 40% of them dislike piped music and only 7% like it.

And yet most shops play music these days. Why?

There are three reasons. First, the desperate need for the music industry to create new revenue streams has led to strong sales pressure from Muzak and its competitors, backed by hyperbolic claims in one-eyed research about the effects of music on customer satsifaction. Second, the billion flies argument: everyone else is doing it, so it must be a good idea and shoppers must like it. And third, it can work. If carefully chosen by someone who really understands the function of a space, the people in it, the environmental factors (noise, quality of sound system etc) and the brand or values behind the space, music can create a delightful, appropriate and effective experience. Sadly, this is rare and most piped music is bland, mindless and ineffective - which, in my opinion is why it is so offensive to many people. We all understand music very well (though nobody knows quite how), so we find inappropriate music upsetting: somewhere deep down we know it's wrong.

Tha's why the issue raises such strong feelings. There are even organised anti-piped-music communities such as PipeDown and Mu-sick, to name but two of several. Many people, me included, mourn the devaluation of music that results from its use as a universal veneer. Society's relationship with music has been radically changed as a result of its omnipresence in public places: it used to be something we had an active, intense relationship with, but now most of the time it's the soundtrack to some other activity.

But all of this is isn't why Muzak has just gone bust. The company had tens of thousands of sites, and hundreds of major retailers as its customers. None of these retailers, as far as I know, had rumbled the fact that their music wasn't working, so the big game of the emperor's new clothes was still being played. There is no shortage of piped music in the world, most of it from Muzak, so what went wrong?

And so to possible reason number two: is this a symptom of the bigger disaster that is the commercial music industry today? Album sales are nose-diving, digital rights management (DRM) is becoming indefensible, and young people believe that music is a right, not a commodity (or product, as the old record companies used to describe it). Has Muzak gone belly-up because people won't pay for their music any more?

It's an attractive premise but it falls down because we are unaware of the cost of the music we are subjected to in shops. It is, of course, far from free, and we certainly do pay for it in higher prices. The music industry, through its licensed agents, is rabid about collecting fees for all public performance of music, despite the regular bad PR arising from its pursuit of corner shops or local garages with radios on for their staff. The legal landscape is complicated in established markets: in the UK, the Performing Right Society and Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (now combined as PRS for Music), and Phonographic Performance Limited, collect for different rights in any one piece of music. For big retailers the fees are huge, running into millions a year, and our experience at The Sound Agency is that the methods of calcuation are arcane, often incomprehensible and inconsistent. In less developed markets, it's like the Wild West: you can obtain cheap bootleg MP3 music from many Russian and other Eastern European websites, and there is little policing of public peformance, so vast amounts of music are bought and played illegally.

But even with effective policing, however large the fees are, and however difficult the system is to understand, the shopper is oblivious to this or to the extra cost of the musical wallpaper they suffer in stores. There is no equivalent of an organic section - a quiet room where you can buy goods without listening to or paying for the music. (Come to think of it, that's a great idea!) So this can't be the reason for Muzak's downfall either.

Which brings us to the third possibility - business model. All the piped music companies have been operating the same business model: an up-front fee (typically leased) for purchase of their players, plus monthly fees for each site served.

The players are usually adapted PCs, sold in large volumes by the pipers to leasing companies which then charge the retailer a monthly price for the staged purchase over three years. The music piper makes a 10-25% margin on the initial sale. The retailer doesn't have to find a big pile of cash for the boxes. The leasing company does what it knows best. Everyone is happy at that point.

Over the next three years (the typical life of one of these deals) the pipers charge a monthly fee per shop. This has to cover the rights to the music - typically that can amount to £20 or more a month - plus the service contract for the kit. It should also include a service fee for the piper to cover music updates, account management, administrative costs and R&D.

This is where it all goes wrong. The pipers have become so competitive in pitching against each other that they have driven the monthly fee down to the bone. It barely covers the rights and service fee - indeed in some cases it doesn't even do that. There is no margin for the piper, so all their profit is in the initial sale. They become like sharks, having to move forward with new sales all the time or die. The problem is that what was once a vast virgin market is now highly competitive and mainly sold-up and under contract.

There is a great analogy here with the mobile phone companies. Ten years ago they made all their money from selling handsets, and they could hardly make enough to satisfy the demand. Now everyone has a handset and the market is so competitive that we expect not to pay for replacements in most cases. Seeing this coming, companies like Nokia and Vodafone have successfully transitioned from a volume product sales model to a rich service model: their profit stream is shifting from handset sales to a lifelong relationship based on offering great services like navigation, music (of course!) and personal organisation.

The pipers just didn't see the wall approaching. Muzak took on massive debt to expand, but it failed to grow in the right direction - towards added value services and a profitable ongoing relationship with its clients, and away from being a box seller.

In Europe, Mood Media has taken a slightly different tack, expanding into the fast-growing digital out of home market - retail TV to you and me. This will give the company several years of rapid growth, but eventually, when every shop has screens all over the place and we are all complaining about being bombarded with video messaging at every turn, the same wall will be standing in the way.

In sum, businesses based on capability ("We're doing this because we can") have limited life-spans. Businesses based on need, value and service ("We're doing this because people want it") have long-term sustainability, as long as they listen to the market. Piped music in its current guise and with its current business model is a busted flush because it's based on technical ability and an assumption about customer need that is not grounded in reality. The DOOH market should pay attention right now: this could be you in five years.

My hope is that retailers will start to use the new tools that are available, especially in the new field of neuromarketing, to create an integrated approach to retail environments, designing them in all five senses. As far as sound is concerned, I believe that carefully crafted generative, ambient soundscapes will replace music in most retail and other public spaces, doing the same job as a good piece of design with lighting and colour - creating a space that's interesting, branded, appropriate, comfortable, functional, and pleasant to be in.

Shut that door!

2008-11-12T09:23:00.002Z

It's time for retailers to close their front doors. Not only do open doors admit traffic noise and fumes; they also let out vast amounts of wasted energy. A new UK pressure group called Close The Door estimates the cost at hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and is gathering excellent media coverage and growing political support: there's a private member's bill due in Parliament at the end of this year.

In the US, the Long Island Power Authority estimated that retailers waste 20 to 25 percent of the energy they consume by allowing air-conditioned cool air to waft out onto the sidewalk - and in some areas the proportion of shops with their doors open as a matter of policy was a high as 65 percent. According to LIPA Chairman Richard M Kessel:

“Customers should ask the stores to close their doors. What good does it do to worry about such issues as air quality, global warming and high energy prices when one is scooting in an out of stores that waste 20 to 25 percent of the electricity they use? The message from customers should be: Be Cool – Keep it Closed.”

Now New York's Mayor Bloomberg has passed legislation banning shops from leaving their doors open while running their AC. But in the UK the practice remains common in summer and winter alike. A stroll down London's Oxford Street reveals that the vast majority of store doors are wide open, leaking energy and admitting noise and fumes. In my book I wrote this about the aural consequences:

I have stood in booth-like cell-phone outlets on Oxford Street wondering aghast how the people who work in there survive without therapy, and how any sensible business conversations take place at all. To add insult to injury, some of them are playing semi-audible music, presumably in the hope that this will make everything fine. It doesn’t.

I speculated that the noisy and smelly front few metres of many stores is effectively dead space, with much lower takings per metre than the more comfortable back part of the store, negating any benefits retailers claim from their open doors letting more people in; also, closed doors stop people from leaving just as much as they stop them from entering.

I would love to see a return to the old-fashioned system of revolving doors, which keep the noise out, the energy in and require no power to operate at all. An extra aural (and also environmental) benefit would be getting rid of those noisy and wasteful hot air blowers that many stores use instead of air curtains.

Shops with closed doors would be quieter, calmer and much more pleasant places to be, and I believe sales would increase - as long as the retailers also control their habit of playing mindless music, which surveys have shown upsets at least a third of their customers.

I welcome the new campaign and look forward to some sensible legislation on this in the UK very soon.

Technorati Tags: noise, shopping, retail sound, shops, environment, Close The Door

Stoke are noisiest fans in UK football - official!

2008-11-01T16:31:00.004Z

Sky TV have been measuring the average noise levels at UK Premiership football grounds all season, and they have just released the league table showing which fans make the most noise. The results are surprising for two reasons: first because newbies Stoke City are at no 1 (and bottom of the table Spurs are in second place); second because of the high levels of noise achieved.

The Stoke fans' average of 101.8 decibels is just below the threshhold of pain, equivalent to a powerful stereo system on maximum volume. Though short of Sky's claim that it matches a jet plane taking off, this is nevertheless between three and four times louder than the noise level at which factory or construction workers are required to wear hearing protection (85 dB). Impressive output indeed - and just in case any Stoke fans are concerned, no damage will result from exposure of just 90 minutes a week.

The noise levels jump to an even higher peak when a goal is scored of course, and these get really intense. The noisiest goal award goes to Newcastle, whose fans reached an amazing 114.8 dB when Michael Owen scored against Bolton. That's like being in the front rows at a rock concert.

However there doesn't seem to be any great correlation between noise levels and league position or long term success: Manchester United are way down the table. Maybe success breeds complacency, while fear and desperation ignite extra fervour - which could also explain the Spurs result.

Here's the full table:

1 - Stoke City - 101.8 decibels
2 - Tottenham Hotspur - 97.58 decibels
3 - Liverpool - 95.4 decibels
4 - Portsmouth - 94.3 decibels
5 - Newcastle United - 94.06 decibels
6 - Aston Villa - 92.2 decibels
7 - Chelsea - 92.06 decibels
8 - Middlesbrough - 91.3 decibels
9 - Arsenal - 90.8 decibels
10 - West Bromwich Albion - 90.26 decibels
11 - Everton - 89.98 decibels
12 - Blackburn Rovers - 89.3 decibels
13 - Bolton Wanderers - 88 decibels
14 - Manchester City - 87.25 decibels
15 - Fulham - 87 decibels
16 - Manchester United - 86.5 decibels
17 - West Ham United - 86.15 decibels
18 - Wigan Athletic - 86.16 decibels
19 - Hull City - 84.6 decibels
20 - Sunderland - 84.05 decibels

What people really think about brands

2008-10-28T10:02:00.003Z

I'm enjoying brand tags, a site that aggregates people's one-word associations with major brands as tag clouds. It's a fun and also very useful resource for anyone interested in brands or marketing, giving a quick and clear view of what people really think of those big brands. Essential, not mention addictive, and highly recommended!

Conversation with the Planetwalker

2008-10-25T14:06:00.002+01:00

Wonderful meeting with John Francis, the Planetwalker who spent 17 years in silence while he was walking across the US and Latin America. I met John originally at TED2008 and it was a pleasure to catch up in London, where he is on a short visit for the launch of his book. John is a gentle man who has achieved amazing things: during his long walk he took a degree and a PhD in land resorces and then taught at degree level, all without saying a word.

In the 22 years that John walked, and the 17 years that he refrained from speaking, he found a gentle yet potent wisdom about our way of living. His message is simple but challenging: saving the world starts and ends with respecting ourselves and the people immediately around us - for if we care about others, we will behave in ways that don't create bad consequences for them, or for the planet. John is now United Nations Goodwill Ambassador to the world's grassroots communities, and a leading figure in the global environmental movement. he's also an inspiration to us all, and I heartily recommend his book Planetwalker.

Naturally with my sound-based perspective, what fascinates me most about John's remarkable story is how he was transformed by his elective silence. Within 24 hours of deciding not to speak, he discovered that he had never truly listened. With no possibility of answering people, he found that instead of planning his next remark, or judging his degree of agreement or disagreement, he was simply listening. For most people, the silent part of conversation isn't really silent at all: their internal voice is judging, assessing, cross-indexing, selecting potential replies, or working out how to impress others or to win the contest that often underpins conversation.

In my book I write about the different qualities of listening that exist, and distinguish three dimensions: active-passive, empatheric-critical, and reductive-expansive. Active listening is designed to make the other feel heard, using techniques such as reflection and summarising; passive listening is non-judgmental, akin to the way we listen to music. Empathetic listening is designed to make the other feel emotionally understood; critical listening has conscious filters in place. Reductive listening is selective, discarding whatever's not on-target for the listener's goals; expansive listening is simply curious, open to whatever comes.

What I think John Francis discovered as he walked in silence and listened to the world is the richness of passive/empathetic/expansive listening, the polar opposite of the most common position in the Western world, which is active/critical/reductive. When speaking is taken out of the equation, all that remains is experiencing the words of others in the here and now. It's no coincidence that many spiritual masters and religious orders have adopted silence as a practice. (For more about silence as a whole see my previous blog on silence here). The difference with John is that he undertook the practice in the real world, not in a walled community where it was the norm. His experience sheds unique insight on the value of silence. I think all children should spend at least a week in silence as part of their education. What a different world we would inhabit if we all learned to listen in this way!

Simplicity v Security - and whither privacy?

2008-10-19T20:14:00.002+01:00

Well here goes... this feels like attempting a triple toe loop or a double pike, but I am setting out to post to my blog from ScribeFire within Firefox, with an automatic feed from my blog to Twitter via Twitterfeed. Then I will be trying to clip some material from the web with autopost to my blog via Clipmarks, and thus to Twitter... then the final step will be to set up some subscriptions on my blog. All that and I still won't have integrated Facebook, socialmedian, Evernote and many other tools that all promise to make me a nexus for all the universe's relevant information.

The odds of all this working are about 50:1 and it's taken what seems like (and probably is) days to learn about it, subscribe to all the various websites with their individual user names and passwords - OpenID notwithstanding. I know I'm verging on geriatric at 50, but I like to imagine that even the highly netted-up younger turks of my acquaintance like Mike Butcher, Thomas Power and Mitch Joel have their moments of overwhelm. There must be a great business out there for somebody who can integrate all this stuff and either configure or manage it for clients.

Meanwhile the main trade-off still seems to be between simplicity (one easy-to-remember username and password on all sites, with full auto-completion) and security (a different, secure name and password on every site, manually typed in every time). For most people the latter must involve buying and diligently using a secure database for all those passwords (I use a great little app called SplashID which syncs between my Mac and iPhone) - but these databases can presumably be hacked... not to mention the investment of time in retrieving the passwords and, even more annoyingly, finding that this website is yet another one you forgot to enter into the database and having to open a duplicate acccount! I suspect millions are choosing simplicity over security.

And then there's good old-fashioned privacy. I saw a talk at TED 2008 about the future of social networking. It was pretty scary. At the end I asked: "What about privacy?". The answer was: "Forget it - your children have already left it behind." While those over 30 agonise about what to post on Facebook v LinkedIn, what to tweet and who is a real friend, the teenagers are already out there sharing everything. Maybe it's the end of masks and role playing, and the dawn of a new, integrated and wholly honest age. Or maybe they will all get badly burned and find new ways to silo their personae online. Being British and my age I still value privacy, which is one reason why I react against the audio pollution in train carriages, where I receive all sorts of personal information I don't want about my fellow travellers as they rabit away on their mobiles, seemingly oblivious to the existence of those around them. The other day a man paid his builder in just such a carriage, reading his credit card details out for all to hear. Maybe privacy is indeed a dying value. I for one will mourn its passing.

The Sound of Silence

2008-08-15T17:15:00.001+01:00

I'm just back from a short holiday in Northern Italy, where my wife is from. Doing what I do, I naturally listen to every place I visit and on this trip three experiences made me think about the subject of silence.

First was a visit to Isola S. Giulio in the middle of beautiful Lake Orta, near Milan. This small island houses a basilica and a convent for a community of nuns of a silent order, which is why it's known as 'the island of silence'. Encircling the island is a single footpath: La Via del Silenzio. Visitors are encouraged to walk the path in silent reflection, and every hundred metres or so there is a board showing one meditation on silence for the way out, and on the other side one for the way back. I was struck by these meditations because they are so universal. There is no hint of Catholic dogma; rather, they resonate with the deep wisdom mined by every spiritual path that has discovered the power of silence - which is most of them. I list these meditations at the end of this blog, so that you can use any or all of them without having to go all the way to Orta. Walking the path and internalising these reflections created a sense of deep peace and wellbeing, and of being fully present in the moment - which is probably saying the same thing in two ways.

Second by dramatic contrast was Milan's railway station. This is a monumental building from Mussolini's time, built on massive scale and with the acoustics of a cathedral. Sadly its grandeur is being eroded by the recent installation of many plasma screens showing a looped couple of minutes of advertising - with sound played through the entire station PA system. At first I thought they were playing opera, until the fragment repeated again and again as a small part of the loop, advertising as it transpired a mobile phone service. Opera in that space would have been interesting, pleasing and, with La Scala close by, very appropriate. The looped advertising sound felt intrusive, overbearing, irritating and even profane in that grand building, adding a gratuitous extra level of noise to the existing reverberating cacophany of train engines, footfall, voices and sundry machinery. When I lecture on sound I end with our Four Golden Rules for public sound. Rule 1 is: make it optional. Rule 2 is: make it appropriate. Rule 3 is: make it valuable. Rule 4 is: test it and test it again. The sound in Milan station breaks all four rules at once. (Incidentally, all the subway stations have two large projectors on each platform, again with sound booming out of them. Thank goodness that in London the projectors now being installed are silent.) I blogged earlier about the digital out of home industry that is putting screens up in every conceivable location, and about the need for these installations to integrate their sound carefully into existing soundscapes. Milan is a very worrying example of what could be the future in all public spaces if we're not careful. Never did silence seem more valuable than in this awful noise.

The third experience was high in the awe-inspiring Dolomites, which I think are the most beautiful mountains on the planet. We trekked for three days, staying at rifugii up to 2,500m above sea level. The air was like crystal, the views were overwhelming and from time to time we heard the silence of the mountains. In my experience, the deep silence of nature is to be found only in high mountains or in deserts (hot or cold), because in these places there are no birds or insects. When the wind dropped and in between the intermittent high-altitude overflights by Ryanair, the Dolomites offered us that rare experience. This is where I agree with Evelyn Glennie, who said in her wonderful film Touch The Sound that silence is itself a sound, and not just the absence of sound. The deep silence of nature is rich and pure: it is the essential context for all other sound, just as a dress in black (the absence of all colour) is the context for what it contains. This silence is the sound between all sounds. Immersed in it, one can start to sense connection and resonance with all of nature.

As we traveled back, I reflected on the different kinds of silence. At the extreme is an anechoic chamber. With no sound source and zero reverberation, this is the purest silence humans can achieve (because we can't survive in a vacuum, the ultimate silence). However, after a short time in such intense silence one starts to hear internal sounds: blood pumping, lungs and other organs moving, tinnitus in the ears. This overbearing artificial silence does not, it transpires, offer us the experience of silence at all.

In a truly silent building such as Worth Abbey Church late at night, silence settles on the listener like a warm cloak - but its overtones define the shape of the space. With eyes closed and without any sound, you can sense you are in a huge room. Indoor silence like this is rare and to be cherished, and is wonderful for meditation, prayer, contemplation, or even working. It has an entirely different quality to the silence of the mountains, resonating with all that is best about humanity rather than a deeper connection with nature.

The silence of nature is the finest of all, because in it we sense our connection with everything. However, it's becoming a precious commodity. If silence was golden in the 60s, it's a rare and precious diamond now. There are few remaining wildernesses which offer more than a short burst of true silence. Nature recordist Bernard Krause claims there is now almost no place on Earth – including the North Pole, Antarctica and the dense forests of Indonesia and the Amazon – that is free of aircraft overflights, the buzz of chain saws or other human clatter. Krause remembers when it took 20 hours to get 15 minutes of usable recorded material. “Now it takes 200 hours,” he says.

Away from wildernesses, there is a third kind of silence which comprises lack of proximate speech and machinery, especially cars, planes and trains. This is the silence one can experience at Orta: the soundscape is in fact quite rich, with lapping waves, birds, wind, and even distant human sound such as boats and high planes. It's not total silence, but in this quietness there is still peace, as we found when walking the Way of Silence.

In cities, silence is something that most people actively avoid. Their first reaction on walking into a silent room is to turn something on - radio, TV, stereo, anything to stop the silence. They have become so used to urban noise that they feel uncomfortable without it. I think urban living has created an addiction to noise as a means of avoiding being fully present. This is fully expressed in the way so many people now walk around with iPods on or speaking on their mobile phones. In the noise of the city, we are becoming like ghosts: not really there at all.

Silence is a medium for growing human consciousness, an invitation to be fully present, and a doorway to a sense of connection with the universe, or God if you prefer. How sad that we have made it an endangered species - and that this process is accelerating. Will we in future trek across mountains wearing our iPods? Have we lost the desire to be present, connected and conscious? Or can we preserve the silent places and benefit from them in the ways of our ancestors?

If you hope for the latter as I do, then why not respond to this blog by posting some places you know where silence can be experienced. And then take some action to protect them. Maybe we can start to reverse the tide of noise and defend the silence in the world.

The silence meditations from Isola S Giulano, Orta

In the silence you accept and understand

In the silence you receive all

Silence is the language of love

Silence is the peace of oneself

Silence is music and harmony

Silence is truth and prayer

In the silence you meet the Master

In the silence you breath God

Walls are in the mind

The moment is present, here and now

Leave yourself and what is yours

Noise costs retail millions

2008-07-05T16:59:00.003+01:00

Canadian sound guru R Murray Schafer estimates that urban environments are getting noisier by around half a decibel every year. If that's right, our cities are twice as loud as they were 20 years ago. That feels about right to me - but it's the noise indoors in public spaces that I am really starting to struggle with. I'm 50, and so my ability to extract signal from noise is declining. This ability is called the 'cocktail effect' in the excellent book Sonic Experience by Jean-Francois Augoyard, which lists all the major sonic effects we experience. It's a common, possibly universal, aspect of middle age to have this ability dwindle, and it makes loud public spaces more or less intolerable. The act of pulling one strand from the spaghetti requires such intense concentration that it becomes exhausting. In my experience also seems to be a general increased sensitivity to background noise, especially OPC (other people's conversation). I am fine with a loud film or gig, but many modern restaurants and shops drive me nuts.

This was the subject of the recent piece in The Times by Stefanie Marsh (click here to see it online). I took Stefanie on a tour of some particularly bad examples in London's West End. Representing catering was Carluccio's. I enjoy their food but every one of Signor Carluccio's restaurants that I have visited sounds awful. The cookie cutter design uses no absorbent material at all: hard floors, tables, chairs, walls and ceilings and often box-shaped rooms all combine to create appalling acoustics, so that even at half capacity it's hard to hear your companion. When full, you just have to join everyone else in bellowing. Oh, and they play music on top of the din, which is just adding insult to injury. Probably the worst offender I know in London is Moro in Exmouth Market, where the same interior design principle (ban anything soft) combines with an open plan kitchen and tables about four inches apart to create a dining experience that could only be enjoyed in isolation with a pair of headphones on - and even then you'd need to be playing the Raconteurs rather than Chopin to drown out the din.

Shops are worse offenders in one sense. They may be quieter than Moro but the penalty they suffer from making the wrong noise is so much greater. Few people will complain or walk out of a restaurant because it's too noisy, though many will never go back. Shops on the other hand are far less sticky. Based on personal experience and interviews with many shoppers I believe that many people turn around and leave before they even get inside a shop because of its noise. The eyes are being told: "Come in, hang out, spend your money", but the ears are being told: "Leave at once, hostile environment, not safe".

Shops don't even know they are losing all this business. Most of them now keep their doors open all day, admitting the noise and fumes from the busy street outside and making the first few feet of the store virtually uninhabitable. Presumably this is based on some piece of research showing that people find open doors less of a barrier to entering. But open doors are also less of a barrier to leaving, which is the course of action most people take when they find themselves in an unpleasant soundscape.

Most shop soundscapes are arbitrary. Nobody designed them: they are the accidental results of design by people with no ears, plus music programming that's based on the incorrect assumption that jolly pop music is right for all occasions, plus the various activities taking place and machines operating in the space.

These soundscapes are also incongruous: they work against, rather than with the visual branding.

And finally they are hostile: they cause stress reactions such as release of cortisol or increased heart rate and blood pressure, and so people leave sooner than they would if there were a pleasant soundscape.

Every retailer knows that sales are related to dwell time, especially for more complex or expensive items or multiple-item purchases. In the current climate of reduced high street sales, it's bizarre that most retailers are turning many customers away and truncating the visits of many more with their bad sound. In effect they are shooting themselves in the foot daily, suppressing their own sales with inappropriate and unpleasant soundscapes. This thoughtless practice is costing millions every day. I know that's true because we've shown with clients that we can increase sales by 3-10% by installing an appropriate soundscape. And remember the population in the developed countries is aging rapidly, so shops need to be thinking about keeping older customers happier because there are less young ones to rely on. This means less noise and more clarity: soundscapes that are properly designed with a foreground and a background that go together harmoniously.

The smart retailers are starting to experiement right now, so maybe the antidote to retail recession will be beautiful sound instead of cheaper oil!