sound business- julian treasure - sample chapter

7/25/2019 Sound Business- Julian Treasure - Sample Chapter

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Sound Business

Julian Treasure

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Contents

Introduction .........................................................................11

Part 1. Sounds Interesting ....................................................15

1.1 The nature of sound....................................................17Vibration ..............................................................................................17Resonance ..............................................................................................19

Entrainment and synchrony ....................................................................19Sound ....................................................................................................23Harmonics .............................................................................................27Soundscapes ...........................................................................................29

Measuring sound ....................................................................................31Acoustics................................................................................................39

Remedial treatments ...............................................................................481.2 Hearing ...................................................................... 531.3 Listening .................................................................... 60

Pattern recognition ..................................................................................62Differencing............................................................................................64Stochastic sound .....................................................................................65

Qualities of listening ..............................................................................65Part 1 References ............................................................. 77

Part 2. Sound Affects .......................................................... 79

2.1 The Emperors naked! ................................................812.2 The main classes of sound ....................................... 83

The human voice ....................................................................................83Music .....................................................................................................92Natural sound .......................................................................................97

Noise .................................................................................................. 101The sound of silence ............................................................................ 108

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2.3 The Golden Rules of sound ..................................... 1121 Make it optional .............................................................................. 1122 Make it appropriate ......................................................................... 1133 Make it valuable .............................................................................. 1134 Test it and test it again .................................................................... 114

2.4 The sound of the future ........................................... 116Generative sound ................................................................................. 116Interactive soundscapes ......................................................................... 118Sound delivery technology ..................................................................... 119

2.5 The SoundFlowTMmodel .........................................125Sound drivers ...................................................................................... 126Filters ................................................................................................. 132Outcomes ............................................................................................ 136Crossmodal effects ............................................................................... 150

Part 2 References ...........................................................153

Part 3. Sound Practice ........................................................157

3.1 Sound and brands .....................................................159

3.2 BrandSoundTM ....................................................................................................... 162

BrandSoundTMGuidelines ................................................................... 164The eight expressions of a brand in sound ........................................... 164

3.3 Brand voice ...............................................................1683.4 Brand music .............................................................1703.5 Sonic logo ................................................................1723.6 Advertising sound ....................................................1783.7 Branded Audio .........................................................183

3.8 Product sound ..........................................................1873.9 Soundscapes .............................................................196Corporate receptions ............................................................................ 196Lifts and lobbies.................................................................................. 198Toilets ................................................................................................. 198

Meeting rooms ..................................................................................... 200Shops and other retail spaces ............................................................... 203Showrooms .......................................................................................... 212Catering and hospitality ...................................................................... 213Staff spaces ........................................................................................ 218

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2.2 The main classes of sound

The human voice

There is no sound more powerful than the human voice. Volcaniceruptions may be louder; music may be more beautiful; a lions roarmore thrilling; surf more soothing but the human voice is the onlysound that can start or stop a war, direct the course of nations, create

amazing technologies, bring people together, underpin every aspect ofour commercial activities, and of course say I love you.

Our voices, like our fingerprints, are unique. There are those whowhisper, those who shout; those who mutter and slur, those who boomand enunciate; there is slang or dialect, and there is correctness; there arethose with musical, enchanting voices and those with flat, grating ones;there are thousands of languages and millions of accents.

Given the power of the human voice it is incredible that the vast

majority of people have never had a moments training in how to useit, and probably have never spent more than a few minutes consciouslythinking about their own voice. We all learn to speak in an unconscious

way, picking up from parents, school friends and other intimates ouraccent, our vocabulary and phrase bank, and our range of inflectionsand tones. Not many of us were consciously engaged in the process ofdeveloping our voice, our sound (in the sense of a jazz musician havinga sound). It changes over time, whether we are considering individuals

or society as a whole. Listening to old recordings of people from allsocial backgrounds brings this home clearly: nobody today speaks theway radio announcers of the 1930s did.

And there is more than just our sound. We all instinctively manageour delivery to communicate much more than our words are saying. Thismetalanguage communicates our emotions, our context (background,status and so on) and our intentions, as well as altering the sense of what

we say, for example with irony or sarcasm.

We all need training to become masters of our voice. Any businessthat invests in this kind of training will establish a major advantage in

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clear and greatly more effective communication. Lets look at some ofthe main aspects of voice that can be worked on.

Generation

Eastern mystics say that breath is life, and our voice is nothing but breath.Its no surprise then that in many traditions, the voice is our essence, ourprimary connection with the universe. In pretty much any tradition orsociety, its the single most important manifestation of our being in theoutside world.

In simple physical terms, the process of our voice starts when air isdirected through our larynx, in which are located the ligaments of our

vocal cords or folds. Mens cords are 17-25 mm long, while womensare 12.5-17.5 mm, which is why mens voices are deeper and womenshigher. As we force air past these cords they vibrate, and we modulatethis vibration with attached muscles. This creates a fundamental tone ofaround 100 Hz on average for men and 200 Hz for women.

Overtones

The human voice is rich with overtones up to about 3 kHz, all unconsciouslycreated and mainly delivered consistently by each individual with theirown particular signature mix. Few people with untrained voices everconsciously change their overtone profile. The best actors and singerscan do this at will, however, completely changing their sound.

It is discomfiting to become conscious of ones own vocal overtones.I had this experience when training with the brilliant American overtonesinger and teacher David Hykes in Denmark. Using his adaptation of

Tuvan overtone singing techniques, Hykes can simultaneously singa fundamental and also a higher-pitched harmonic, and can modulatethem both separately so he sings two melodies at once. Its stunningand captivating to hear*, but to do it yourself is like suddenly seeing the

world in colour. When I first learnt how to do this, my own voice seemedsuddenly to become a rich choir; car engines were singing to me, andevery aural experience was infinitely richer as I could hear the harmonicsin each sound.

* The best introduction is the classic website Hearing Solar Winds, available from Davids

website www.harmonicworld.com.

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Being able to sing overtones may have limited direct applications inbusiness, but this kind of training is wonderful for team-building and itdoes result in a hugely heightened awareness of your own voice and thesound around us. I recommend it.

Registers

Going back to the vocal cords, we modulate their raw sound energy byusing resonances in many cavities of the head, throat and chest cavity.

This is what creates the different registers of the voice, and why actorsand singers sound very different to untrained speakers.

There are four registers. The chest registerproduces our fundamentaltone, and creates our deepest, fullest vocal sound by using the resonanceof our large chest cavity. Most Africans are firmly based in this registerin their speech. Because it creates much more sound energy, its the one

we need when speaking to groups, and is highly developed in actors andprofessional public speakers who need to project to be understood upto 100 metres away with no microphone. Its impressive to see a trainedperson do this without shouting. Anyone can learn, without having tohave a chest like Orson Welles or Pavarotti; leading voice coach FergusMcClelland claims he can teach someone how to move their voice intothis register in five minutes, though I think it may take rather longer tobecome a master of this skill.

The head registeris where we generate our higher voice the onewe, in the West, use most of the time. (My wife being Italian, I knowthis register well: its the one used almost exclusively by Italian women.)Resonating mainly in the cavities of the head, its more nasal and throatyin sound than the chest register, with less bass and fewer overtones.

When we engage the falsetto registerit feels like changing gear, andwe move to a higher range of tones altogether. This is the range whereColdplay singer Chris Martin spends much of his time, and is a big partof the bands familiar and very identifiable sound. Most men rarely gohere in conversation unless mimicking womens voices; however, possiblybecause it carries flavours of passivity, levity, even ridiculousness, thisregister is a defensive base for many women, who use it to stay out of the

way of dominant male vocal traffic. There are vocal trainings for women

in business that help them to emerge from this form of unconscious self-deprecation and move into the more assertive head and chest registers.



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Finally there is thewhistle register, little used and less understood,which creates ultra-high notes (soprano C and above). If youre a MariahCarey fan you will be familiar with this register, but the rest of usencounter it very rarely.

Envelopes

Having generated sound and resonated it, we create envelopes to shape itby using the muscles of our mouth and face, and by directing air throughour nose and mouth. Most of the content (our words) is communicatedin this last step; this is why we can understand the content of a whisper,

which involves no work for the vocal chords at all and is effectively justshaped noise, as well as we can the content of a passionate address. As

we all know, however, it is difficult to create metalanguage in whisper.Emotion is far better conveyed when we have tone and harmonics toplay with.

Projection

Being heard at the back is not just a matter of generating from the chest,

though it starts there. It also requires the right breathing techniques andthe right stance.Discuss the voice with any actor and it wont be long before you hear

the word diaphragm. Where you and I breathe and talk from the topof our lungs, someone who is serious about projecting will be aiming touse air from right at the bottom of the lungs, and pushing it out withfocused pressure from the thoracic diaphragm, the huge shelf of muscleacross the bottom of our ribcage that controls our breathing. This is thesecret of any big voice youve ever heard: it comes from big breath andconscious use of the diaphragm.

Almost as important is posture. Its not easy to project while sitting;almost impossible while lying down. The best posture is feet square onthe ground, about shoulder width apart, facing the audience squarelyand standing upright with the weight evenly balanced on the balls of thefeet. The best speakers retain eye contact with the audience at all times,speaking to one person at a time and never to all of them together.

Once breathing and stance are correct, projection is all about delivery:clear enunciation, good pace and inflection (both dealt with below) will

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ensure that the message gets all the way to the back of even a large andcrowded room.

Inflection

Another aspect of the voice that has a radical effect on our effectivenessas communicators is pitch, expressed in speech as intonation or inflection(the sing-song variation in tone we employ in order to add sense to ourspeech, for example raising our tone at the end of a question).

Its important to use inflection, and in business its generally betterto err on the side of too much rather than too little. Another word forboredom is monotony, which simply means the continuance of anunvarying tone. If we inflict this on people, boredom is what we will berewarded with.

Some people naturally inflect well, possibly those with a moirmusical ear, or those for whom sound is the primary sense. Others arenot so naturally blessed and they simply have to work at it. Usually it isntuntil we hear a recording of ourselves speaking that we get a true pictureof our skill with inflection. Most of us can improve.

Inflection varies around the world, and awareness of this is importantfor anyone communicating with people from different cultures. Somecultures inflect a lot and use a wide range of tone changes think of anyItalian conversation while others prefer a much narrower range andhave fewer inflection conventions to choose from for example German.Cultural differences may be small but very noticeable, for example thepractice of high rising terminal (HRT), where the speaker raises his orher tone on the last syllable of a statement, as if it were a question? Oncefound mainly in Australia, this is now spreading rapidly among youngpeople in the English-speaking world, particularly the UK and the US?I for one hope it dies out, as it robs speech of variety and meaning. Onthe other hand, differences may be large but not noticed, for example

when Westerners learn tonal languages like Chinese and fail to grasp thesubtleties of the intonation required in order to be understood.

Transcultural intonation is interesting and important in internationalbusiness, but it is in day-to-day intonation that most can be gained.Intonation is a major element of metalanguage, and it can easily

communicate key messages, such as the speakers level of confidence,interest, enthusiasm, happiness, openness and so on. Why would we



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want to leave all this to chance in a business conversation? Many times Ihave witnessed someone whom I know to be enthusiastic and interestedgiving all the wrong metamessages because their unconscious intonationhabits are just trundling along as normal, saying things like Im cool,Im really laid back, I dont make an effort for anyone, Im fashionablydisengaged, I dont care if you like this or not because Im not really thatinterested.

If I am conscious about my inflection I can give much more usefuland accurate metamessages than these, such as Im very interestedin this conversation, Im excited, Im confident, Im present and fullyengaged, and thisis important. Again this is something that most peoplehave never consciously considered, and something that is rarely trainedin business. I suggest that almost any business will benefit from its peoplemastering conscious intonation.

Pace

How many times have you sat in some pain, listening to a highly nervouspublic speaker rush through a talk, jumbling words, confusing sense,randomly spraying emphasis around and succeeding only in enrolling theaudience in his or her dearest wish, which is to stop talking? Or, equallypainful, listening to someone whose sedate pace of delivery never varies,eventually lulling the audience through sheer monotony into a stupefiedstate not far from coma?

Pace is another potent tool. It can create great emphasis (by slowingdown and stressing each word deliberately); it can generate excitementand enthusiasm (usually done with high-paced delivery). Its also anotherpowerful element of metalanguage, communicating many things that wedont actually say, particularly about our own state of engagement orexcitement.

Any trained top-class public speaker will use pace consciously all theway through their delivery. Why do we allow sales people, call centrestaff, shop floor staff and announcers to be completely unconsciousabout their pace when this is such a powerful aspect of communication?

Accent

Some people are more sensitive than others to incongruity between

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Vocabulary

I have long had a sense that the vocabulary of the average British person

is shrinking, and that this has been accelerated by the growth of theInternet and the use of text and mobile phones.

This was confirmed recently by a Tesco-sponsored study by LancasterUniversitys Professor Tony McEnery, who found that teenagers todayin the UK use only half as many words as 25-34 year olds. The top20 words of the teenagers (which of course included yeah, no, butand like) account for a third of their speech. Their average vocabularytotalled 12,600 words, compared to the 21,400 words used by the next

generation up. Professor McEnery cited technology isolation syndromeas the main culprit: this generation spends an awful lot of time playinggames and listening to MP3s rather than communicating with each other.Employers are already complaining that young recruits lack the skills toanswer the phone and have a professional conversation with a customer,or speak effectively to groups or in meetings. He concludes: Kids needto get talking and develop their vocabulary.

Of course another explanation of the disparity could be that we learn

a lot of words between our teen years and our mid-twenties. Howeverthis is sadly not likely to be the case, as US evidence indicates: the typicalAmerican six to 14 year old of the 1950s had a vocabulary of 25,000words; by the year 2000 this had shrunk to just 10,000 words.23

In the UK we have had a major recent educational emphasis onliteracy, so one hopes that reading and writing have improved. But itseems to me that there has been much less attention paid to articulacyor on its foundation, which is vocabulary. Business can help here bypressuring governments to teach public speaking in schools, and byproviding training for first-jobbers in these important areas.

Mirroring

Weve considered a range of tools that can help optimise the effect ofthe human voice in business. They all work in public speaking, and as wefound when we looked at entrainment, a good speaker using these skillscan cause a whole room full of people to fall into step with his or her

brain waves.All the voice skills can also be deployed where appropriate in one-



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to-one communication, either face-to-face or on the phone. One veryeffective way of doing this is mirroring, which involves consciouslymatching register, pace, intonation, vocabulary, even accent to those ofthe other person. Often this all happens instinctively to some degree,but when used intentionally it can hugely enhance the power of delivery,creating fertile soil for the messages to land in.

Mirroring needs to be approached with care and practised intensivelybefore being tried in the field. It can come across as gauche, stiff,insincere or manipulative. Its most effective when being done in agenuine attempt to create a good connection with another person, toremove pointless obstacles that would be in the way of an importantmessage being received.

What is extremely useful all the time is to be aware of the effectof ones own register, pace, inflection, accent and vocabulary on otherpeople. Whether business communicators aim to mirror or not, theyneed to be conscious of their sound; not just doing their natural thingand being surprised when someone didnt hear them.

In effect this means listening while you are talking, which may soundimpossible, like breathing in while you are breathing out, but in fact

it is a hugely powerful business technique. Sadly, it is rarely taught inmanagement training courses.

Music

Of all the types of sound, music is the one we find most fascinating.Perhaps this is because it expresses our ability to makesound: we cantcreate light with our bodies, but we can create sound. More likely its

because music affects us deeply and mysteriously; it is a language we allunconsciously speak and understand.

Music is undeniably important. It exists in every culture on Earth.It is central to mother-infant bonding and communication; it attendsall our social rites of passage (comings of age, marriages, funerals); itbonds our communities (tribal dances, football chants, Band Aid); itinforms and shapes our courtship and love lives (ballads, our song,slow dancing); it gives us courage and even strikes fear in our enemies in

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war (bagpipes, marching drums, jingoistic popular songs*); it shapes andfocuses social change (rocknroll, Woodstock, punk, Live 8); it is integralin our spiritual and religious practices; and now it provides a soundtrackfor many peoples daily lives through personal stereos.

For hundreds of thousands of years we humans have made music.According to archaeologist Steven Mithen, music came before language.He suggests that our ancestors originally communicated via a musical,non-verbal proto-humming, which possibly originated in the instinctivemusic of the mother-baby relationship, and which used the metalanguagetools we have just been considering intonation, pace, register with no

words at all. For Mithen, the advent of language sidelined music from itsoriginal role as our core communication vehicle. Language is processedby different areas of the brain to music, and these have become dominantas we have concentrated exclusively on lingual communication, leavingmusic as a powerful tool that we now use without really understanding.24

The same essential argument is to be found in other recent work onmusic, such as Philip Balls The Music Instinct. Ball writes that we areinnately musical, and that learning to listen to music offers a directroute to the core of our shared humanity.25Daniel Levitin, analysing

the neurological effects of music in his This Is Your Brain On Music, alsoconcludes that musics antiquity and ubiquity show that it is essential toour humanity, and that we are now genetically hardwired for music.

This rings true with me far more than the alternative stance fromevolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who proposes that music is anaccident with no useful function for our species (he calls it auditorycheesecake). This flies in the face of musics universality. If it were trulyuseless it would surely have withered and been discarded thousands of

years ago. Instead, in the words of leading music psychologist DonaldHodges: Musicality is at the core of what it means to be human. For, tobe human is to be musical and to be musical is to be human.26

Just as humans share so many features (including the vast majority

* Sound itself has been developed as a weapon by the US Army and Navy, who have

experimented with both ultrasonic sound (using beams of sound at high energy levels either to

carry unpleasant noise that disables the enemy or even to cause physical damage on their own)

and infrasonic sound (which can create sickness and even instant bowel evacuation). There is awhole book on the subject called Sonic Warfare Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear by Steve

Goodman if you want to know more.



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of our genetic code) with higher apes, language and music have moresimilarities than differences. Both have structure; both have individualevents that combine to create complex forms (languages syllables - words- phrases sentences chapters - books compared to musics notes -chords phrases - melodies songs albums, as a rough example); bothhave syntax; and both can communicate meaning and emotional states.

There are significant areas of overlap, such as poetry, where cadence andrhythm are so vital, and chant, especially mantric chant, where the wordsand the music fuse and its hard to know which is predominant.

The work of Professor Michael Tomasello27 on human cognitionindicates that we have to learn a range of socio-cognitive skills in orderto use language while our musicality is there from the beginning. Inother words, we are born musical but we have to learn language.

Its worth reflecting on the spiritual dimension of music here. Wehave discussed the universality of vibration the fact that we humans,like everything else in the universe, are composed of essential vibrations.

The principles of entrainment and resonance tell us that one vibrationcan affect another, so it seems eminently reasonable to speculate thatsound vibrations will affect the vibrations within us, changing the state of

our component matter in ways we dont yet understand. Every advancein quantum physics seems to move its frontiers further into contact withmetaphysical concepts, and this kind of postulation is far less bizarrethan, say, the idea that two particles, once they have connected, cancommunicate changes in their state instantaneously across the vastestdistances, or the notion that every experiments outcome is affected bythe very presence of an observer.

A religious perspective would be that music comes from and connects

us to God; certainly, music has been used in every religious practice as achannel to the divine, and a potent portal to states of spiritual connectionand even ecstasy.

A metaphysical version would be that human music is our naturalresponse to the music (vibration) all around us what the Sufis call themusic of the spheres. Perhaps we perceive this at a non-conscious level,and our human music is a necessary response to affirm our place in theuniverse.

Wherever music comes from, it exists everywhere there are humanbeings, and we are now studying it in earnest. In the last century the

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formal study of the role and effects of music commenced with thework of Hermann von Helmholtz, and the resulting academic fields(psychoacoustics, music psychology, ethnomusicology, biomusicologyand more) have exploded in the last forty years. There are now legionsof academics studying music from every angle. In Hodges essentialHandbook of Music Psychologythere is a listing of major music psychologytexts and another listing of books in every contiguous field from musicand chaos theory to plant music.28The rate of publication has increasedrapidly in the last four decades.

This level of study is long overdue, because music is entwinedthrough every aspect of human activity. It is found in homes, schools,community events, sport, religion, celebrations, politics, the military,healthcare, physical exercise, marketing, cars, planes, public spaces,commercial spaces, personal stereos, films, concerts, TV and music isin its own right a huge business, although, as has been well documented,one in great flux. In January 2007, Reuters reported that global onlinemusic sales had doubled to $2 billion, 10 per cent of total sales but thisincrease had not been enough to stop total industry sales from falling by3 per cent compared to the previous year. Nevertheless, at $20 billion

revenues, the industry is still a significant element in the world economy.All this money comes from (and stimulates) an ever-increasing

quantity of recorded music. I fondly remember a time when, as a musicfan, it was really possible to feel that one knew what was going on:the weeks important releases could be counted in the dozens. By the1990s, the position had become very different. University of CaliforniasBerkeley College estimated that in 1999 the global production of uniquemusic CDs was around 90,000 units. At 45 minutes per CD, it would take

about eight years to play that one years output back to back. Someonelistening eight hours a day, five days a week would take over six monthsto get through a single weeks output. Berkeley further estimated thatthe worlds stock of CD titles was around 1.4 million which must havegrown to well over 2 million by now. We long ago passed the point at

which we could keep up with the quantity of music being released.So music is everywhere, its flow has become a torrent and there are

hundreds of people analysing it but none of the research that I have

seen gets anywhere near unlocking the black box. We still have no realidea how music works. This is probably because it simply contains too



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many parts: melody, harmony, timbres and instrumentations, voice andwords, tempo and rhythm, style and associations all these things affectus, as well see when we go into the SoundFlow model in detail. Whenthey are all working and interacting at the same time, it is impossible toseparate out the individual strands of the spaghetti. All we can really dois eat it and see what happens.

There is plenty of research of that kind, so we certainly do havesome ideas about the effects of music on people in various situations.

As the world leader in piping music into commercial spaces, the MuzakCorporation has a vested interest in proving that music can createbusiness benefits, and it has done a lot of research to prove it. Hodgesand Haack29list the following benefits claimed by Muzak to arise fromusing its service:

A 29 per cent decrease in nonessential conversation or activities amongtelephone company employees

A 32 per cent decrease in lateness and absenteeism among the employeesof a giant corporation

A 39 per cent decrease in errors in the accounts payable section of abusiness office

An 8 per cent increase in productivity, even after a bonus system had beeninstalled, in a publishing company

A 19 per cent increase in key punch productivity at an electric utilitycompany with a corresponding decrease of 32 per cent in errors

A 53 per cent decrease in airline agent turnover

An $8.4 million increase over expectations in bank earnings

A 25.5 per cent better accuracy rate in editing

A 25 per cent increase in enjoyment of the workplace A 16 per cent increase in problem solving abilities.

As Hodges and Haack conclude: If these figures are the result ofrigorous, controlled experimentation, as Muzak claims they are, they givea clear indication of the powerful influence music can have on workingbehaviours.

There is now a large amount of research from independent, academicsources about the effects of music on peoples behaviour in shops, mallsand restaurants. The top-line summary is that music does significantly

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affect people: it can speed them up or slow them down, and it can changetheir mood. As a result they behave differently and, most importantlyfor the retailers in question, it affects the amount of time and moneythey spend in the establishment.

Sadly, few retailers have taken the time to understand the researchproperly. In fairness there are often countervailing influences to consider;most of the academic studies aim to measure the effects of only one

variable, so in order to predict holistic effects one has to combine theseindividual influences (and of course cross-modal effects where othersenses than hearing are being affected). This is more art than science,

which leaves the field open for the smooth selling of music as the one-size-fits-all solution for every commercial space by the music industryand its representatives in the various licensing bodies. Of coursethey wantto veneer the whole world with music: the industry is declining (down7 per cent overall in 2009), and the performance rights market is oneof only three growth areas left to cling on to (along with live music andsongwriters music copyrights, which includes the lively new band/brandspace where artists are being sponsored by the new patrons of the 21stcentury brands).30

I love music, and thats exactly why I hate to see it being turned intosome sort of aural whitewash. Most music wasnt made to be backgroundsound; it was made by people who care, and who want their work to belistened to, which is why very often it doesnt work to try and ignore it.In sound, intention is always important. Thats why music is often not fitfor purpose as a background sound.

Well be looking at the effects of music on people in more detail in theSoundFlow section a little later, and adding some practical experience

and specific reflections when we discuss sound in all types of space inPart 3.

Natural sound

Wind*

We hear wind in leaves, in grass, over rock, moving sand and dirt,

* Some examples are on the website.



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and against the flaps of our ears. Its dynamic range is huge, from thesusurrance of gentle zephyr that offers a moments relief from the heat ofa desert day to the deafening roar of the strongest winds on Earth duringthe dark winters of the Antarctic. Its sounds subtly define our naturalenvironment, as for example in the difference between the percussion offleshy, mid-Spring leaves, dry, brittle late-Summer leaves and mid-Wintertwigs. We know and respond to these tiny signals instinctively; they helpgive us our bearings every day. I dont believe anyone has ever done anyexperiments on the importance of these tiny, myriad aural data flowsderived from the movement of the air around us, but I would expect thatsubstituting an inappropriate signal (for example the sound of wind inbare twigs on a summers day) would create a profound feeling of unease.

Water*

Waters main songs are the sounds of rainfall, streams and rivers and ofcourse the sea. As with wind, its range is enormous, from the gentlestburbling of a tiny brook to the overwhelming all-frequency bombardmentof a mighty waterfall. Water is life-giving, the essence of our survival;

we find its gentler sounds soothing and restful, which is why fountainshave always been so popular, particularly in hot and dry places. Manypeople think fountains are created to look attractive, and certainly theyhave been raised to high visual art by the likes of Bernini, but their firstfunction has always been to bring the sound of water (the other essentialsound of life, alongside breath) to a place without it.

Birdsong

Birds, and in particular songbirds, densely inhabit the same regions wedo: the temperate and tropical regions. Nobody knows why they sing(notwithstanding the theories you may have heard about territory andmate selection), or why some birds sing exquisitely beautiful songs andother just croak or squawk. Birdsong becomes more and more amazingas you study it: slow down the lightning-fast song of a thrush or ofthe diva of songbirds, the lyrebird, and you find complex, repeatingstructures that combine rhythms that would challenge most master

* The website contains examples of types of water sounds, and also birdsong in various

locations, including a section of slowed-down song.

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percussionists with pitch sequences and modulations that use morenotes, subtler relationships and levels of vocal gymnastics way beyondany human. It sounds like virtuoso jazz played at breakneck speed and then you remember that this is slowed down to one quarter of theoriginal delivery pace. David Rothenbergs excellent book Why BirdsSing31goes into this topic in detail, and is highly recommended, thoughhe doesnt consider the psychoacoustic question we need to considerhere: what does birdsong do to human beings?

At the most basic level, birdsong tells us that we are safe. We havelearned over countless millennia to use the ceaseless diurnal vigilance ofthe birds, turning them into unpaid guards by virtue of their practice ofchanging their song, or most often falling silent, if danger approaches.

When the birds are singing, all is well. Its when they stop singing thatwe need to be on alert. I have no doubt that a sudden cessation ofbirdsong will still create a release of cortisol and adrenaline, the fight/flight hormones, in a modern human being.

Birdsong is also natures alarm clock. When the birds start singing, itsgenerally time to get up, so we associate birdsong with being awake andalert. Thus playing birdsong tends to make people feel cognitively alert.

The third effect of birdsong is to connect us with the world. Theremay be some element of feeling not alone in this, of being in thecompany of other living things that are no threat to us. Birdsong seemsto affirm life and the joy of it (and there is good reason to believe thatthis is actually why birds are singing for much of the time). I have metonly a handful of people who dislike birdsong; most people enjoy it andfind it beautiful. It seems natural for us to take aesthetic pleasure in oneof the planets signature sounds one that has been there far longer

than we have, according to current theories. Our developed appreciationof birdsong may be there because listening to it is a significant physicalmanifestation of our connection with nature a connection that modernliving has severed for many millions of people.

Whatever the reasons, birdsong is enduringly popular. Musicians havealways been fascinated by it: Mozart kept a trained starling to listen to, andMessiaen attempted to recreate birdsong in his later music, though mostbirdsong is impossible to transcribe. Its not only trained professionals

who appreciate the uplifting nature of birdsong: in the UK recently, aBritish Trust for Ornithology CD of nightingale song rushed off the



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shelves as fast as they could be restocked, as did the British LibrarysDawn ChorusCD. Maybe this is because, as a study by Reading Universityfound, encounters with the natural world boost mental health by givinga sense of coherence.32

For these and other reasons explored in the SoundFlow section(such as the likelihood that high frequencies charge our neural systemup, refreshing us) we have used birdsong as an important element ofsoundscapes that weve created for several clients, including an airportterminal soundscape for BAA and the default soundscape for BOX,Londons high-level specialist consultancy workspace. *

WWB

As we have seen, the combined soundscape of wind, water and birds(WWB) is primarily stochastic and, after hundreds of thousands of yearspractice, we effortlessly apply differencing to move it to the background.In my opinion we have also developed a symbiotic relationship with thistype of sound. It makes us feel comfortable because it has always beenthere. Most of the time it was the onlysound: the odd war would make alot of noise, and there were loud local events like blacksmiths hammersor church bells, but all these were noticeable mainly because they

were relatively rare compared to WWB. Anywhere you found humanson the planet, the soundscape was dominated by one or more of thecomponents of WWB.

Its only in the last 250 years, since the Industrial Revolution, thathuman beings have started to live in places where none of the threeprimary stochastic sounds exist. From this time onwards the soundscapesof our cities changed dramatically and they are certainly not stochastic.

They are composed of much starker, more noticeable sounds, like roadvehicle engines, tyres and horns, trains, planes, a plethora of variedwarning tones, and other peoples conversation. Most of these are aboveour differencing threshold, and none of them (save generalised trafficnoise) is stochastic in the sense we are using here. Not many streetsoundscapes merge pleasingly into a strangely comforting wash!

I believe the removal of WWB and its replacement with non-stochastic

* There are examples of both these soundscapes on the website, along with a loopable section

of birdsong for you to use at home or at work for rest or for stress-free working.

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urban soundscapes have created two results. The first is stress. Insteadof using the effortless resources weve developed over hundreds ofmillennia to move WWB to unconscious listening, our sound processingsystem is having to work overtime to suppress a barrage of noise all day.

This is hard work, and not surprisingly its tiring. Many people have towork in places where the ambient noise level is well over 80 dB, and thereis plenty of research to show that their health suffers. (For more on this,see the section on Staff Spaces in Part 3.)

The second result, I believe, is that we are pining for WWB. This wasbeautifully illustrated when I was buying a sofa for our office some timeago in a small furniture shop in London. The charming, knowledgeableand elderly salesman and I were trying to negotiate terms over the topof BBC Radio 2, which was being piped loudly to all parts of the store.

As I often do, I asked if the music could be turned down, a request towhich he responded with enthusiasm. When we could hear ourselvesthink, I asked him why they had the music at all. If it was up to me we

wouldnt, he said. But people like some noise these days.I suggest that the removal of WWB has left us with a vague feeling of

loss: we know we ought to be listening to something, but we dont know

what it is so we put on music, or the radio, or the television. As notedabove, birdsong is an excellent alternative: at BOX, people who haventeven noticed the birdsong remark on how fresh they feel at the end of ahard full-day workshop.

A respect for, and understanding of, the significance of WWB forhuman beings is an essential tool to take into the business of designingsoundscapes for the spaces we inhabit today.

Noise

Noise is becoming a major issue in the modern world, primarily becauseit has been growing continuously for many years. Perhaps it has reacheda threshold at last, a level beyond which people are not willing to allowit to go on increasing. Modern city soundscapes can be as loud as 90 dB,and are generally over 80 dB, and they have been getting louder everyyear. Estimates of how much louder vary, but Murray Schafer is usually a

reliable guide in these matters and he reckons the rate of growth is halfa decibel a year.33This means that cities are twice as loud as they were



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twenty years ago.What do we actually mean when we use the word noise? Its not a

concept that is unique to the world of sound: scientists and engineersare familiar with noise in all sorts of systems and environments, fromcomputers and electrical circuits to cosmology. One simple definitionfrom the world of engineering starts with a simple duality between signaland noise. Signal is all the information we want. Noise is a residual inthis view: everything that is not signal is by definition noise. Anotherdefinition is that noise is simply unwanted signal.

This is all somewhat subjective. In his fascinating bookNoise34, BartKosko emphasises that one persons noise is often another persons signal,as in the increasingly common urban phenomena of the noisy neighbouror the train carriage mobile phone conversation. To the average hard-core punk, Beethoven is unpalatable noise; to a devoted classical musicbuff, the Sex Pistols may be noise incarnate.

The purest form of noise is called white noise. Most people haveheard of it, but not many know what it is. In fact, pure white noisecannot exist because its definition is a sound with equal power acrossan infinite range of frequencies. That would require an infinite amount

of power, which is of course impossible. In practice, white noise issound with equal power across all the audible frequencies. White noiseis perfect noise: it is the same everywhere, so it has no signal (or it isall equally signal). We perceive it as predominantly hissy, but this is justbecause of the uneven sensitivity of our hearing: we are more receptiveto higher frequencies.

Pink noise compensates to some degree for that unevenness byincreasing the power logarithmically as the frequency increases, applying

equal power in bands that are proportionally wide for example thesame amount of power from 20 Hz to 40 Hz as from 2 kHz to 4 kHz. Inconsequence its actual power declines in a straight line as frequency rises,roughly matching the increasing sensitivity of our hearing. We hear it asa more broadband noise. It is often described as white noise adjustedto sound flat to humans, but this is in fact not the case. It sounds flatterthan white noise, but for a truly flat sound we have to turn to one of themany other colours of noise: grey noise.

Grey noise is white noise with an inverted A-weighting. Although wehave noted that A-weighting is not a flawless map of human hearing, the

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effect of boosting all the frequencies we dont hear so well and reducingthe ones we are most sensitive to is undeniably to produce a much flatterquality of noise. *

There are even more colours of noise, including brown, blue, orange,green and even black. None of them are of interest for our purpose so

well leave them in the textbooks.In some situations noise can actually be beneficial: for example,

stochastic resonance is the principle of adding some noise to a non-linear system and thus improving its performance. Masking sound is apractical example of this process.

However, most often noise is a problem. Noise is becomingomnipresent and as weve noted is ever-increasing in urban areas. Itis now a major concern for governments because it has serious socialand economic consequences. Noise limits our channel capacity and isfragmenting our society. As Kosko notes: A high level of backgroundnoise partitions space into many small acoustic arenas.35 These aretypically created by the simple expedient of a pair of headphones and apersonal stereo.

The World Health Organisation has published guideline maxima for

daytime and nighttime noise exposure (55 dB and 45 dB respectively,both A-weighted averages over the relevant period). It is clear that manypeoples health is being damaged by exposure to levels that exceed thesemaxima. When Building Research Establishment (BRE) carried out theUK National Noise Incidence Study for the Government in 2000, itreported that the majority of the UK population are still exposed tonoise levels exceeding [the] WHO guidelines.

Across Europe the same picture is seen: the WHO study Community

Noise by Birgitta Berglund and Thomas Lindvall Stockholm, Sweden,warned in 1995:

Almost 25% of the European population is exposed, in one wayor another, to transportation noise over 65 dBA (an average energyequivalent to continuous A-weighted sound pressure level over 24 hours)(Lambert & Vallet, 1994). This figure is not the same all over Europe. Insome countries more than half of the population is exposed, in othersless than 10%. When one realizes that at 65 dBA sound pressure level,

* You can hear samples of white, pink and grey noise on the website.



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its effects (Administrative Conference of the United States, Alice Suter,1991) says: Even moderate noise levels can increase anxiety, decreasethe incidence of helping behaviour, and increase the risk of hostilebehaviour in experimental subjects. These effects may, to some extent,help explain the dehumanization of todays urban environment.

The cost of invasive noise to society and to business is staggering.The official EU estimate: Present economic estimates of the annualdamage in the EU due to environmental noise range from 13 billion to38 billion. Elements that contribute are a reduction of housing prices,medical costs, reduced possibilities of land use and cost of lost labourdays. In spite of some uncertainties it seems certain that the damageconcerns tens of billions of euro per year.

A good proportion of the enormous cost of noise is undoubtedlyfalling on business in the form of lost productivity, paid sick leave,absenteeism, antisocial or unproductive behaviour and the cost ofmistakes made by noise-affected employees. It is well documented thatpeople who are short of sleep have slower reaction times and make moremistakes; the EU estimate above, vast though it is, does not include anyof this huge extra cost.

This is a classic case of the competitive economy failing to workbecause the indirect costs of an activity are disassociated from the actionitself. Economists have struggled for years with the problem of whatthey call negative externalities, for example a loud party where everyonepresent is having a great time but the neighbourhood is suffering thefallout in the form of lost sleep, irritation and frustration. We need tocreate feedback loops that promote self-regulation of these social evils, inmuch the same way that legal and taxation regimes have been developed

to combat chemical and other forms of environmental pollution. Ifcompanies were required to account publicly for the billions in noisecosts caused by their core activities like transport, construction andmanufacturing, we would certainly see some changes.

As Ive already suggested, most heavy diesel vehicles are inordinatelynoisy simply because nobody has ever asked the manufacturers to makethem quieter. Like air pollution in decades past, it has not been a featuremuch considered when choosing a fleet of trucks or buses. We have seen

a quantum change in carbon emissions since specific laws and taxes wereintroduced to incentivise people to make and operate cleaner vehicles.



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Now we need the same techniques to incentivise them to make and runquieter vehicles.

Of course its not just corporate noise that invades the domesticsoundscape. Commenting on the EU noise maps, Newsweek noted:A single noisy motor scooter driving through Paris in the middle ofthe night can wake up as many as 200,000 people.37 However, asidefrom noisy neighbours, the top noise nuisances planes, trains, roadtraffic, construction and heavy industry are predominantly generatedby organisations, not by individuals; it seems clear that organisationsare responsible for most of the noise invading our homes, as well assuffering most of the hitherto hidden cost. I hope this book will help tolink the activity with the cost, and to introduce the idea that less socialnoise will lead to higher profits, as well-rested and relaxed employees willdo better work faster and with less mistakes.

The main practical problem until recently has been the lack of waysto quantify ambient noise and its effects. Europes noise maps, which willeventually cover the whole of the EU and, one hopes, spur the rest ofthe world to follow suit, are proving invaluable in identifying the mostblighted areas so that we can at last get to grips with the worst of ambient

noise. They are also an important manifestation of societys communaldesire to push back, to find more and better mechanisms to quantify thissocial bad and to levy its cost against those creating it so that they havean incentive to act in other ways.

Londons ambient noise strategy was another step forward. The 295-page plan, entitled Sounder City and published by the Mayors office inMarch 2004, was the first such strategy published by a city authority andit informed policy on public transport, which is a major noise generator.

New, quieter buses have been on trial in London, including hydrogenfuel cell and hybrid-electric vehicles, and there are more initiatives tocome. The strategy covers every aspect of noise that comes under thecontrol or influence of the city authority, including aircraft, industry,police vehicles, refuse collection, commercial vehicles, traffic and localnoise legislation. In time perhaps every major city will have such a plan.

Ultimately, though, repelling the sonic invaders of our homes will bethe job of governments, using the twin tools of legislation and taxation.

The problem with large social evils like noise pollution is that thereis no point in one organisation changing its ways if all the others are

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going to carry on as before: the improving organisation would simplybe disadvantaged (except in special cases, for example if its noise wereaffecting mainly its own workers). And so the situation persists, worsenseven, until the rules of the game are changed for everyone.

Governments will act only when they sense enough desire for actionamong their voting populations. This means its in all of our hands. I feeloptimistic because noise is climbing the political agenda year by year, andbecause we are developing the tools that will show us the damage thatsreally being done. With this knowledge, and the practical experience ofnoise blighting so many homes, we can hope that the public will focuson the problem, the politicians will act, and that ambient noise levels

will peak in the coming few years and then start reducing in the seconddecade of this century.

Noise at work

Inside working spaces, noise can adversely affect productivity, morale,motivation, teamworking and health. In high-noise occupations, theeffects are known to include headaches, fatigue, gastric problems such asstomach ulcers, increased blood pressure, stress, and excessive exposureto the fight/flight hormones adrenaline and cortisol. In offices, researchshows that noise leads to reduced productivity, stress, unwillingnessto help and communicate and other undesirable effects. How strongthese effects are depends largely on the three Cs: control, contrast andconversation.

Control

The unstoppable rise of the personal stereo stems at least in partfrom the desire of every human being to retain control over his orher personal space, including what they hear. In essence, the iPod is adefence against intrusion. (We look at this in more detail in section onpersonal soundscapes.) The same process operates at work: if peoplecannot exercise some control over the noise around them, it becomesan intrusion and creates stress. Control could be turning the volumedown, switching a device off, asking for quiet or moving to a quiet space.

Without the ability to control noise, people become upset, stressed,negative and less productive.



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Contrast

There is evidence that constant noise is eventually habituated: in other

words, if its constantly loud, people can adapt. This is vitally related tocontrast, or variability. If the noise is unchanging or highly repetitive (likea loud machine) then the brain can adapt after a time. If it varies, andparticularly if it stops and then restarts, habituation is destroyed. Also,people who are not used to noise find it more upsetting than people whohave already habituated. Finally, there is no research yet on the long-term effects of acclimatised exposure to constant loud noise, but it isreasonable to assume that this must be fatiguing and unhealthy over time.

Conversation

We saw in our review of listening why conversation is the most distractingnoise of all. When you can hear what someone else is saying, you cannotstop part of your brain from paying attention and your performancesuffers. It is not just quantity of noise that matters: if the noise is mainlyintelligible conversation, it can be relatively quiet and still cause greatdisruption. Well review the effects of noise in working spaces in detail in

the SoundFlow section and also in the relevant parts of Part 3.

The sound of silence

Most people would say that silence is the opposite of sound, but DameEvelyn Glennie takes a different view and I agree with her: silence is asound, as well as being a context for all other sounds. To understand thisit is necessary to experience silence fully. This takes some effort now,but it is worth it. I cherish memories of moments spent in complete

silence. On retreat at Worth Abbey in Kent, UK, it is possible to sitalone late at night in the huge circular modern church, much of it builtunderground. There is just one spotlight on the central alter. After theechoes of ones entrance and movement die away (the reverberation timeis impressive) the silence settles like a thick garment, pressing in, gentlyinsistent but never oppressive. The sense of time passing fades and themoment stretches into eternity. This kind of silence is an experience tobe embraced, essential for a real understanding of listening. Finding it

is not easy as buildings like Worth Church are rare and other truly silentplaces, like deep caves and remote wildernesses, are often hard to get

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to or occupied by other people who dont have the same objective andcheerfully make noise to avoid precisely the experience I am describing.But I commend it to you as something to do at least once a year like cleansing your palette or detoxifying your body, it enriches yourappreciation of the usual, and in some way resets you and helps you tocope better with modern living.

I did just that a while ago on a short holiday in mountainous NorthernItaly, where my wife is from. Doing what I do, I naturally listen to everyplace I visit and on this trip three experiences made me rediscover the

value 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 fora community of nuns of a silent order, which is why its known as theisland of silence. Encircling the island is a single footpath: La Via delSilenzio. Visitors are encouraged to walk the path in silent reflection, andevery hundred metres or so there is a board showing one meditation onsilence 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 isno 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. Here are the meditations:

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

Walking the path and internalising these reflections created a sense ofdeep 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 Milans railway station. This is a



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monumental building from Mussolinis time, built on massive scale andwith the acoustics of a cathedral. Sadly its grandeur is being eroded bythe recent installation of many plasma screens showing a looped coupleof minutes of advertising with sound played through the station PAsystem. At first I thought they were playing opera, until the fragmentrepeated again and again as a small part of the loop, advertising a mobilephone service. Opera in that space would have been interesting, pleasingand, with La Scala close by, very appropriate. The looped advertisingsound felt intrusive, overbearing, irritating and even profane in thatgrand building, adding a gratuitous extra level of noise to the existingreverberating cacophony of train engines, footfall, voices and sundrymachinery. (Incidentally, all the subway stations have two large projectorson each platform, again with sound booming out of them. Thankgoodness that in the London Underground the projectors now beinginstalled are silent.) Milan is a very worrying example of what could bethe future in all public spaces if were not careful. Never did silence seemmore valuable than in this awful noise.

The third experience was high in the awe-inspiring Dolomites, whichto me are the most beautiful mountains on the planet. We trekked for

three days, staying at rifugi up to 2,500 metres above sea level. The airwas like crystal, the views were overwhelming and from time to time weheard the silence of the mountains. In my experience, the deep silence ofnature is to be found only in high mountains or in deserts (hot or cold),because in these places there are almost no birds or insects. When the

wind dropped and in between the infrequent high-altitude planes, theDolomites offered us that rare experience. The deep silence of nature isrich 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 canstart to sense connection and resonance with all of nature.

There are unquestionably different kinds of silence. At the extreme isan anechoic chamber. With no sound source and zero reverberation, thisis the purest silence humans can achieve (because we cant survive in a

vacuum, the ultimate silence). However, after a short time in such intensesilence one starts to hear internal sounds: blood pumping, lungs and

other organs moving, tinnitus in the ears. In the end, this overbearingartificial silence does not offer us the experience of silence at all.

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In a truly silent building such Worth Church, overtones define theshape of the space. With eyes closed and without any sound, you cansense you are in a huge room. Indoor silence like this is rare and to becherished, and is wonderful for meditation, prayer, contemplation, oreven working. It has an entirely different quality to the silence of themountains, resonating with all that is best about humanity rather than adeeper connection with nature.

The silence of nature is to me the finest of all, because in it we senseour connection with everything. However, its becoming a preciouscommodity. If silence was golden in the 1960s, its a rare and preciousdiamond now. There are few remaining wildernesses that offer morethan a short burst of true silence. Nature recordist Bernard Krauseclaims there is now almost no place on Earth including the North Pole,

Antarctica and the dense forests of Indonesia and the Amazon thatis free of aircraft overflights, the buzz of chain saws or other humanclatter. Krause remembers when it took 20 hours to get 15 minutes ofusable recorded material. Now it takes 200 hours, he says.38

There is a third kind of more accessible silence, simply defined bylack of proximate speech and machinery, especially cars, planes and

trains. This is the silence one can experience at Orta: the soundscapeis in fact quite rich, with lapping waves, birds, wind, and even distanthuman sound such as boats and high planes. Its not total silence, but inthis quietness there is still peace, as we found when walking the Way ofSilence.

In cities, silence is something that most people actively avoid. Theirfirst 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 urbanliving has created an addiction to noise as a means of avoiding beingfully present.

Silence is a medium for growing human consciousness, an invitationto be fully present, and a doorway to a sense of connection with theuniverse, or God if you prefer. How sad that we have made it anendangered habitat and that this process is accelerating. Will we infuture trek across mountains wearing our iPods? Have we altogether lost

the desire to be present, connected and conscious? Or can we preservethe silent places and benefit from them in the ways of our ancestors?



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Index

3D sound 213, 214

A

Absorption 46, 48, 49, 200, 208Accent 247Acousticians 38, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49,

201, 208, 224Acoustic panels 201Acoustics 39, 208, 265Adrenaline 138Advertising 146

effectiveness of music 178 radio 178

Advertising sound 178Aeroplanes 230Airbus Industries 191Amazon 243American Technology Corporation 120Amplitude 25, 32

Apple 173, 188, 266Aristotle 127Art galleries 121Attack, decay, sustain, release 27, 131Audio brand guidelines 180Auditory processing disorder 74Autogain units 209A-weighting, definition of 36

B

BAA 100, 117, 232, 267Background sound 30, 209Bandwidth, auditory 61, 62Bar soundscapes 112, 132, 150, 216Basilar membrane 55Beat frequencies 142, 266Behavioural effects of sound 205Berendt, Joachim-Ernst 24, 57, 77, 269Big Bang 18, 23, 265Birdsong 51, 98, 122, 129, 145

Blood pressure, noise and 107Bombardier 192BOX 100, 101, 121, 198, 267

Brainwaves 143Brand music 170Brands 136

effect of music on 179sound of 161

BRANDsenseTM 160, 189, 269BrandSoundTM 162, 164, 187, 204

definition 162Brand voice 168

Breathing 137British Airways 170Brown, Foxy 58BSkyB 197, 256Buddha Bar, the 217

C

Caf soundscapes. See Restaurantsoundscapes

Call automation 253

Call centres 89, 259Call handling 248Campbell, Don 128Carey, Mariah 86Cerego 143, 266Challe, Claude 217Chemistry Communications 117Chevrolet 191Chiller cabinets 193, 205, 266Christmas music 211Chronobiology 138Classical music

and vandalism 123, 135Classroom soundscapes 228Coca-Cola 179Cochlea 55Coffee machines 193, 266Cognitive effects of sound 148, 220Cole, Pete 116Cole, Tim 116Collins, Phil 58

Conduction. See TransmissionConstruction industry 105, 218, 234

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Contrast 130Conversation 108Cortisol 138, 146

Crick, Francis 139Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 61, 62

D

Decibels, definition of 32Demographics 112, 114, 134, 136, 181,

244Density 130Diesel vehicles 105, 194, 230Differencing 64, 130

Disney 121Dissonance 128Domestic appliances 192, 234Domestic soundscapes. See Home

soundscapesDrums 126

and brainwaves 141workshops and teambuilding 127

Dynamics 131

E

Eardrum 54Ears 54Echo 42Elevator soundscapes. See Lift

soundscapesEno, Brian 75, 116Entrainment 19, 91, 127, 137, 142, 149,

237of brainwaves 140, 142

Epinephrine. See Adrenaline; SeeAdrenaline; See Adrenaline

F

Fatigue, noise and 107FeONIC 124Ferrari 188, 243, 244Flat surface transducers 213Ford 191Foreground sound 30, 209Fourier 26Frequency 17, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 31,

32, 36, 44, 46, 48, 55, 57, 142

of brainwaves 139of breath 137of heartbeat 137

FSTs.See

Flat surface transducersFuture Acoustic 52, 236

G

Gastric problems, noise and 107Generative sound 213, 214, 266Glennie, Evelyn 15, 53, 270Golden Rules of sound 112, 124, 205,

212, 216, 243Greater London Authority 193

Gregorian chant 127, 133Guinness 179Gym soundscapes 225

H

Hamby, William 33Hamlet 179Harley-Davidson 188Harmonics 27, 129Harmony 127, 128

Headaches, noise and 107Health club soundscapes 225Health, noise at work and 107Hearing 53, 81Hearing protection 241Heartbeat 53, 137, 146Heating, ventilation and air conditioning

(HVAC) systems 51, 206Helmholtz, Hermann von 95Hemglass 172, 266Hertz, definition of 31Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf 31Hodges, Donald 93, 95, 96, 269Homebase 206Home soundscapes 234Hormones 107, 138, 146Hotel Costes 213Hotel soundscapes 37, 203, 213, 235Huygens, Christian 19Hykes, David 84Hypersonic speakers 120, 213

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I

Inflection 63and culture 87

In-store TV 210Intel 173, 266InterContinental Hotel 132, 214Internet, and audio 258Intonation. See InflectionInverse square law 25iPod. See Personal stereos

J

Jackson, Dan 173Jingle Bells 211

K

Karlsson, Fridrik 226Kelloggs 189Khan, Hazrat Inayat 24, 269Koan 116Kock, Christof 139Kosko, Bart 102, 269

Krakatoa 33

L

Language 93Leeds, Joshua 137, 240, 269Lexus 191Lift soundscapes 198Lindstrom, Martin 160, 189, 269Listening 60, 92, 247

active 66, 67

critical 69, 70 distracted 75expansive 73mens and womens 73passive 68qualities of 65reductive 71, 72, 73

Lloyds TSB 256London Hydrogen Partnership 194Londons noise strategy 106, 194London Underground 135, 231

Loudnessand bar behaviour 150

and shopping behaviour 150Loudness versus SPL 32Lufthansa 174

Lyrics, effect of 147

M

Manufacturing industry 105Marriott 213Martin, Chris 85Masking sound 51, 52, 103, 220McClelland, Fergus 53, 85McEnery, Tony 91Meeting room soundscapes 200

Melody 127, 128Memory, listening and 61Metalangauge 83, 86, 87, 88, 93, 144Metre 126MGM 174, 188, 266Microsoft 173Mileece 198Millennium Bridge 21Milliman, Ronald 149Mirroring 91, 92Miss Selfridge 205

Mithen, Steven 77, 93Modes 127, 128Monroe Institute 142Monsanto 189Morrow, Charlie 124MorrowSoundTMCube 124Mozart Effect 128Museums 121Music 92

academic study of 95

and arousal 147, 155and brands 179and driving 237and homework 222and love 144and negative behaviour 147and restaurant behaviour 149and shopping behaviour 149, 150and time 148and work 51effects of 146

effects on advertising 178effects on shopping of liking 134

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in religion 93in shops 203, 205on hold 148

origins 93psychological effects of 143quantity of 95size of industry 95uses in society 92

Musical style. See TextureMuzak Corporation 96, 203, 221

N

NBC 174

Noise 46, 51, 101, 153, 218, 266, 269and productivity 219at work 108cancellation 241, 242 contrast 108 control 107conversation 108cost of 105effects of 104limits at work 218maps 106

pink 51, 102white 102

Noise criterion (NC) curves 37, 201definition 37

Noise induced hearing loss 57, 58, 218,225, 239, 240, 242

Noise rating (NR) curves 37, 51definition 37

Noise Reduction Coefficient 46, 47, 48,49

Nokia 173, 188Norris, Woody 120North, Adrian 219, 220NXT 123

O

Offices, open-plan 219Office soundscapes 51, 148Other peoples conversation 62Overtones 84

P

Paris Metro 231Pattern recognition 62, 130, 145

Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich 62, 145Personal soundscapes 238Peter Jones 124Physiological effects of sound 131, 137Pickering, Marisue 70Pinker, Steven 93Pinnington, Danielle 210Pitch

and energy 128definition of 32

Plato 127Pompeii, Joe 120Pompougnac, Stphane 213Privacy at work 222Productivity 148

noise and 107Product sound 178, 266Psychographics 112, 134, 136Psychological effects of sound 143Public space soundscapes 226

R

Ravenscroft, Thurl 173Reactive Sound System 52Received pronunciation 89Reception soundscapes 47, 196, 228, 243Researching sounds effects 114Resonance 19, 21, 28, 85Restaurant soundscapes 42, 49, 96, 112,

133, 149, 150, 194, 214Retail soundscapes 30, 37, 42, 96, 112,

113, 124, 133, 134, 137, 147, 148,149, 150, 193, 205, 212, 266

Reticular activation system 60, 130, 141,147

Reverberation 42effects of 42

Reverberation time 45, 46, 49, 201, 228Rhythm 19, 54, 126, 137, 144

circadian 138of brainwaves 139

ultradian 138Ricall 181

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Rolls Royce 191Rothenberg, David 99, 269Rover 189

Royal Bank of Scotland 193

S

Scanner 236Schafer, R Murray 29, 52, 77, 101, 145,

269Schizophonia 145Shetland Museum 117Shoppercentric 210Shop workers 210

Showroom soundscapes 212Sick Building Syndrome 82Siemens 170, 174Sight 81Silence 108, 235Sine waves 25, 265Smell 160Sonic art 198, 227Sonicbrand 173Sonic logos 172, 266Sound

absorption 43and memory 56, 145beams of 122compared to sight 81definition of 23diffusion 43drivers of 126in education 228in love 144in medicine 22, 227, 229, 230

in religion and creation 23in sport 144in war 144of products. See Product soundreflection 41researching effects 114transmission 39uses of 113

Sound Absorption Coefficient 46, 49Sound Advance Systems 123SoundBug 124

SoundFlowTM 100, 213, 214, 215, 216Sound pressure level 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 49

and bar behaviour 150and restaurant behaviour 150and shopping behaviour 150

and space 37and time 38definition of 32

Sound Princess 198Soundproofing 49, 201Sound reinforcement systems 133, 232Soundscape 77, 269

definition of 29Soundscapes

and time of day 118in the future 118

measuring 38Sound Transmission Class 48, 49, 50, 201Sound waves 25Spa soundscapes 226Speech intelligibility 45, 228Speech Transmission Index 46, 223, 224Standing waves 46Starbucks 133Stochastic resonance 103Stochastic sound 50, 65, 100, 126, 131

Street noise 205, 207Stress induced auditory dysfunction 74Stress, noise and 107String theory 18Strogatz, Steven 22, 77, 139, 269Synchrony 22, 139

T

TED Conference 61, 120Telephone 248

Television 234, 235Tempo 126Temporary threshold shift 58Texture 129

effects of 146, 149Timbre 129, 247T-Mobile 170Toilet soundscapes 198Tomatis, Alfred 74, 128, 129Tonal languages 63Toop, David 236, 269

Toto 198Touch 270

275Index


39/39

Townshend, Pete 58Trains 231Transmission 24, 48, 49, 50

Transport termini 232Trolleys 205, 206, 266

U

Underground trains 231Urban soundscapes 101Urban soundscapess 138

V

Variability, of sound 130Vehicle soundscapes 236Vibration 17, 22, 23, 32, 84, 94Vocabulary 91, 92, 247Vodafone 173, 193Voice 83, 144, 146

accent 88envelopes 86inflection 87input and output 245overtones 84

pace 88 projection 86registers 92, 93

registers 85Voice-overs 181

W

Warning sounds 189, 191, 209, 230Water 98, 122, 145Waveforms 26, 131Wavelength 25, 39, 44, 120Web soundscapes 251, 258Werzowa, Walter 173

Whispering Window 124Williams, Robbie 170Wind 97Wind, water, birds (WWB) 65, 81, 97, 145,

203, 265World Health Organisation 103, 104

Z

Zoning, through music 112

276 Sound Business

sound business- julian treasure - sample chapter

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