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My passion for sound started here.
Age six, my mother bought me this record
and I fell in love with music.
Over the years, the music changed. I
learned to play this noble instrument.
Any drummers in the audience?
Cool.
I'm surprised they can still hear me.
By the way, my parents encouraged this
despite the noise. And if you have
children, do encourage them to play an
instrument. When you're playing in a
band or an orchestra, you're developing
a multi-channel, very attentive form of
listening. Which may be why musicians
have bigger brains than non-musicians.
Fact. And they also score better on many
cognitive tests. Playing music is good
for you.
I joined bands, I made records, and I
got a chance to do two of the legendary
John Peel sessions. Here's what the
famous DJ had to say about my name.
Julian Treasure on drums. Are you sure
that's a good idea, Julian Treasure?
It's the only idea I've got, John. It's
my real name.
For 20 years, I put my passion for sound
together with business and I ran an
audio branding company. Asking the
question, "How does your brand sound?"
And designing soundscapes in spaces like
this. Along the way, I wrote a book and
I got a chance to do a TED Talk. Uh
which I think Herb just mentioned. That
spawned four more TED Talks.
And along the way, I had an epiphany.
Selling audio branding was really hard
because most organizations don't think
about how they sound at all. And I
realized the reason for this is that
they're full of people who don't listen.
That's the case.
So, let me prove that by
giving you the example of two of my TED
Talks. The third one was about
listening. The fifth one was about
speaking.
The fifth one has been seen by five
times as many people
as the third one.
We're very keen to be heard, but not to
listen. And that's not an equation that
works that well.
People conflate listening with hearing.
Hearing is a capability. We all do that.
Listening
is a skill.
It's a skill you can practice and
master, not a capability.
Sadly, and I think you may agree with me
when you think about the state of the
world today,
we're losing
our listening.
Why? Well, it starts with education.
Here are the four ways we communicate:
reading, writing, speaking, listening.
Two for the eyes, two for the ears, two
that send, two that receive, presented
here with equal weight. Is this how we
teach them in school?
No.
It's like this, isn't it? We barely
teach children how to speak and not at
all how to listen.
How crazy is this? If we taught children
first how to listen brilliantly,
how much more of their education would
they receive?
Madness. I'll give you four more reasons
we don't listen very well.
The first one is distraction. There are
some very, very big organizations
spending billions of dollars to grab
your attention and mine, as we heard
earlier in TJ's wonderful talk.
Attention is essential for listening.
So, we're distracted a lot of the time.
Second reason,
noise.
When we're surrounded by this kind of
thing all day, every day,
we go numb. We suppress our
consciousness of sound.
Half of humanity lives in cities now,
and some of those cities are very loud.
There's a chart in my book of the
loudest cities in the world, Dhaka in
Bangladesh, average noise level over 120
decibels. That's rock concert loud as an
average. How people can live in that I
have no idea.
The third reason we don't listen, we
invented writing.
We've been speaking, using complex
language, for probably 150,000 years.
We've been listening for probably 3
million years of evolution to survive
and to connect with each other.
Generalized reading
has only been around for probably 200
years, and yet writing has elbowed aside
speaking and listening as our primary
way of communicating.
Where's the listening in a message like
this?
Not much.
And the final reason that we don't
listen is what we're seeing, also
turbocharged by the internet, an
epidemic of being right.
What's the easiest way to be right?
Make somebody else wrong.
Hence, we have a world which is now
populated by outrage and judgmentalism
and blame.
There's a great quote from one of my
favorite authors, Harville Hendrix. He
said, "You can either be right or be in
a relationship."
The cost of not listening is enormous.
We have a world now where 70% of
16-25-year-olds
are reporting that loneliness is
affecting their mental health.
We have huge impacts on
disengagement, polarization you see all
around you, disengagement from politics.
Uh only one in three people are happy
with their government, generally
speaking.
We have disengagement in business as
well, where we don't trust our leaders
overall. And there are costs to these
things. Now, they've been measured for
business, and those of you who run
businesses may want to perk up your ears
at this point. Disengagement, that is to
say people not feeling listened to, not
feeling valued, is costing global
business 8.8 trillion dollars a year
according to this huge study.
And then, what about miscommunication?
Well, this is just America
costing America 1.2 trillion dollars a
year with mistakes, having to repeat
things, getting things wrong, and so on
and so on.
Massive cost, 10-plus trillion dollars a
year globally.
And I think this is a failing of
leadership.
Only 8% of people in this huge study
rated their leaders as very good
listeners.
One in 12.
I actually think there's an inverse
relationship between seniority
and listening.
Two reasons for that, I think. Firstly,
it's the job itself. You're supposed to
know stuff, aren't you, and tell people
things, not listen and ask.
And also, I think ego is involved.
You know, listening is inherently
humble.
When I listen to you, I'm saying you're
important, you're more important than I
am at this moment.
And I think a lot of leaders have an
ego-based problem with that process.
So, [snorts] I've developed a mission,
and my mission is to regenerate
conscious listening in the world. It's
desperate. Uh we are heading in a very
bad direction right now.
The benefits of doing this
are enormous.
Our connection with ourselves, with each
other, and with the planet around us can
be renewed if we start consciously
listening.
Our happiness. We all want to hear to be
heard, understood, and valued.
Listening does all three of those
things.
Our effectiveness. Do you know that if
you work in an open-plan office, which I
expect many of you do,
you can be as little as 1/3 as
productive
because of the noise around you,
particularly other people's
conversation. That may resonate with
many of you.
And our well-being. I mentioned the
damage of noise that is all around us.
It's doing incredible damage to health.
There are something like 200 million
people in Europe having their quality of
life and their health damaged by the
noise around them according to the
latest research.
So, let me entice you to become
conscious listeners by having a little
tour of some of the wonders of sound.
Sound is amazing.
I'd like to use a taxonomy which was
developed by my very good friend Bernie
Krause, one of the world's leading
nature sound recordists, and I've added
one category. So, here's the first of
Bernie's categories,
geophony.
The sound of our planet.
Many beautiful sounds
like this, surf on pebbles.
Gorgeous.
When you listen to a sound like this, or
indeed this,
you're going back in time. These sounds
are unchanged for something like 3.5
billion years. These are the sounds of
ancient history.
The second class of sound to enjoy is
biophony, the sound of the living things
we share this planet with.
This is a lar gibbon.
An extraordinary animal.
Sounds like a synth solo from the 1970s,
doesn't it? Amazing animal. And I'm now
going to play you my favorite sound in
the world. It's another animal sound,
the sound of the biggest animal on our
planet,
the blue whale.
It's going to blow up the subwoofers.
There it goes.
Subsonic sound
which can travel 1,500 km across an
ocean, an entire ocean.
Or at least it used to be able to do
that before we deafened the whales with
60,000 ships moving around at any one
time. Now their range is a tenth of what
it used to be.
Which brings me on to the sound of us,
anthropophony.
Much of it not that great. Until the
Industrial Revolution only 200 250 300
years ago, the world was a pretty quiet
place, but now we've invented incredible
numbers of
machines that create electromechanical
noise. It's very hard to get away from.
By the way, if you want to seek out
quiet places, I commend to you a
website, Quiet Parks International,
where you can find on a map the nearest
quiet place to you to go and perhaps
ruminate in silence.
So, our sound can be awful,
but it can also be sublime. And I
started with this, music can be
inspiring, engaging, or inspiring even.
There's one more category, it's the one
I added to Bernie's three,
cosmophony,
the sound of the universe.
Now most people think space is a vacuum,
there's no sound in space, you can't
hear the nobody can hear you scream, and
so forth. Well, that may be true,
but space is not a vacuum.
It's a very very dilute plasma.
The same plasma that was there at the
beginning of the universe,
so sound waves with long enough
wavelengths can travel through it, even
intergalactic space has sound in it. But
I am talking about very low frequency
sound waves with frequent with with
wavelengths of hundreds of millions of
years of light years, huge sound waves,
way too low for us to hear.
Some places are denser, and this is a
picture of a gas cloud around a black
hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy
cluster, which is vibrating that gas
cloud and creating real sound. 57 to
octaves too low for us to hear, but NASA
have pitch shifted it up, so we can hear
the sound of a black hole. And if you
think that should be spooky,
you're right.
That is the sound of a black hole.
So, perhaps I've engaged you a little
bit to move towards conscious listening.
I'll give you three tips to close with,
which you can take away and use to
become more conscious listeners. Here's
the first one.
Silence.
Give yourself 3 minutes a couple of
times a day of silence, or the nearest
thing you can get to it. It resets your
ears, recalibrates them, refreshes them.
You can listen anew.
Here's the second one, a practice I call
savoring. Very easy to do. Wherever you
are, just close your eyes,
and ask yourself these three questions.
Is this sound around me healthy for me?
Is it helping me to do what I want to
do?
And is it making me happy?
Finally, the four C's of conscious
listening. The first one, of course, is
consciousness.
If you're not aware that you're
listening, if you're not conscious that
you're listening, you're probably just
hearing. It's a different thing.
The second C,
commitment, because it is work. It takes
effort to listen consciously.
The third C, compassion.
Seeking to understand the other person.
Even if you disagree with them, you can
listen to them. Listening is not
surrender, it's not agreement. You can
listen and still disagree.
And finally, curiosity. There's always
something to learn
if you're listening consciously.
Well, guys,
there's only one outcome of conscious
listening. It's always the same,
and that is understanding, which is
something I think you might agree we
need a lot more of in the world around
us today.
>> [clears throat]
>> So, I urge you,
when you go out from here, give the gift
of your full attention to somebody you
love or somebody you know. You may get
the response, "What are you doing?"
Because we're not used to being listened
to with full attention, but it's a
wonderful gift to give. And by giving
that gift, you will increase
understanding in the world.
Please join me in that. Thank you.
>> [applause]
[applause]
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