Interview about Verbal Judo conflict resolution (mp3)

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

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin on the AlloSphere (mp3)

Janet Baker speech recognition pioneer (mp3)

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