Charlie Morrow”s audio history of the world opens in London (mp3)

Most people, and most organisations, underestimate the importance of sound. It’s time for us all to take responsibility for the sound we make, and the sound we surround ourselves with. In our daily lives we rarely encounter one sound in isolation; usually there are multiple sounds firing off all around us. The entirety of the sound in any one location is a soundscape. The word was coined by Canadian sound author and composer R. Murray Schafer. His concept of a soundscape was essentially an auditory

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

Tests carried out for a recent UK TV programme called The Secret Life Of Buildings have produced further evidence that open plan layouts create massive distraction, damaging productivity. The Channel 4 programme’s presenter, architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff, wore a cap that measured his brainwaves while trying to work in an open plan office. The scanner revealed intense bursts of distraction. Dr Jack Lewis, the neuroscientist who conducted the test, said: “Open plan offices were designed with the idea that people can move around and interact

The Sound Agency is expanding its services across the globe with the opening of franchises in South Africa and the Gulf, Nordic and Baltic regions. Earworm ABC has been appointed as our new sub-Saharan franchisee. “After reading Julian’s insightful book Sound Business, I realised that sound branding was the future,” said MD Paul Shafer. “So I was thrilled when Julian offered me the Southern African franchise for The Sound Agency. Through my years of dealing with agency briefs, client expectations and budgets, I’ve come to

The Sound Agency has brought the relaxing sounds of nature and calming music to the City of Lancaster in California, in a soundscape aimed at encouraging a heightened sense of wellbeing. The soundscape was the idea of the city’s Mayor R Rex Parris after he became interested in The Sound Agency’s approach of designing generative soundscapes to produce defined psycho-physiological effects. Mayor Parris saw the opportunity to improve wellbeing and lower crime rates by installing a relaxing soundscape for walkers along Lancaster’s half mile pedestrian

Researchers from the University of Jyväskylä say that making music can alleviate the symptoms of clinical depression by helping people to express their emotions and reflect their inner experiences. Their findings are published in the August issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry. The research team, led by Professor Jaakko Erkkilä and Professor Christian Gold, recruited 79 people aged between 18 and 50 years old who had been diagnosed with depression. 33 of the participants were offered 20 music therapy sessions, in addition to their

Nokia used an innovative crowdsourcing competition to find a fresh version of Nokiatune, the world’s most-played tune (at 1.8 billion times every day!). The Sound Agency’s Chairman Julian Treasure was honoured to be one of the final-stage judges after more than 4,000 entries from 68 countries had been whittled down to a top 10 – the five most-liked in the public voting, plus five selected by a panel. Seven versions of the iconic Nokiatune melody (originally a fragment from Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega) have

Noise can cause damage to health that goes way beyond the ears according to recent research. The world’s first comprehensive report on the health effects of noise, published by the World Health Organisation and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Western European, found that excessive noise can cause a range of illnesses, the most serious being heart disease due to raised blood pressure and blood-borne concentrations of stress hormones and fatty materials. This can accumulate over time (even when people are asleep) and can eventually

It seems it’s not only humans who can benefit from music therapy: a Tuscan wine grower has found his vines responding to the sounds of Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi and Mahler. When Carlo Cignozzi began restoring a Montalcino farmhouse and planting a new vineyard called Al Paradisio di Frassina, he intuitively felt that playing music to the vines would benefit their growth. His early efforts attracted the attention of Amir Bose, who personally supplied the large network of weather resistant loudspeakers required to cover thew whole