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

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

Felix Zenger, beatboxer extraordinaire (mp3)

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,

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!

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

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,

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,

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