One major contributor to the poor quality and excessive quantity of sound that assails us in urban environments is ocular buildings, by which I mean buildings designed and fitted out by architects and interior designers who operate in one sense only: sight. This is sadly the majority of modern buildings in my experience, and in particular spaces like restaurants and corporate receptions, where the desire to impress visually and the modern trend for hard materials come together to create entire rooms with no absorbent surfaces

Following on from my meeting with Ken Livingstone (see The Sound of London post in this blog), I’ve written to him suggesting the setting up of a permanent London Sound Archive.

I want to post a couple of emails here to raise the issue of what I like to call mindless music. The first is from Adrian Cotterill, editor of The Screen, an electronic publication serving the industry variously known as Out Of Home, Digital Signage and Captive Audience Networks – in other words, public TV screens in places like shops, stations, taxis and high streets.

Equalling the excitement of being featured in the hallowed pages of The Economist is not easy, but on July 12 we made TIME Magazine (European edition), including a somewhat metaphorical photo of me by Pal Hansen, taken in my local Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Theunis Bates wrote the piece after we met in Oxford Street and toured some auditory horrors – not hard to do there: if you’re in the area I recommend checking out the Swarovski store and any of the mobile phone stores to

It’s been ages since I’ve posted. The Sound Agency has been flat out for the last several weeks, creating some exciting projects for several household name brands – but I can’t talk about them until the test periods are complete and the clients are happy to go public. It’s wonderful to be putting some of the main principles in the book into practice for these huge companies, because we really have a chance to make the world sound better if these tests tuen out as

It’s my son Ben’s birthday today and my present to him is about 2,500 tracks on the iPod his Mum is giving him, all hand-picked to introduce him to music as I know it after my 40+ years of avid listening: Mozart, Captain Beefheart, Abba, Zero 7, Miles Davis, Underworld – everything I think he might enjoy encountering on a wonderful shuffle journey.

Media interest in the book is strong and we haven’t even sent out the press release yet. There will be a piece in Brand Management magazine next month and I am looking forward to BBC Working Lunch which is confirmed for tomorrow (Wednesday). I hope to receive the first proof copy of the book today, which will be a great moment. I have been populating the wikispace with some extracts from the book and will have completed this by the end of today. I’ll be

They say that all publicity is good publicity, and I am overwhelmed with the huge interest that the book has been creating in all media. Radio in particular has loved it – natural I guess for a story all about sound. I’m grateful for the skill and intelligence with which the various media have grasped and conveyed the basic proposition – that sound is massively powerful; that most of the sound we encounter is undesigned and a lot of it is inappropriate; and that there

I spent some time this afternoon (Thursday) recording some examples of retail and office sound for BBC Radio 5 Live Wake Up To Money and BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. I’ll be doing interviews for both in the morning to follow up on the recorded sound. If you’re reading this after hearing the programme(s) then wlecome and I hope I got the main points across: that sound affects human beings profoundly, and that business has a huge opportunity if it takes control of its sound

You can see my appearance on BBC2′s Working Lunch here if you are in the UK and you have Real Player – I think it may also work with WMP – or on YouTube here. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, as I have every time I’ve done TV. Nik and Adam were very nice and understood the proposition perfectly. I wish I’d been able to mention the book and the website but they cautioned against plugging so I hope people who are interested will find the