– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

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]

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
passion ˈpæʃ.ən B1	noun - A very strong belief or feeling about something, or an intense enthusiasm for an activity.
noble ˈnəʊ.bəl B2	adjective - Honorable, dignified, or impressive in character or quality.
attentive əˈten.tɪv C1	adjective - Listening or watching carefully; showing attention.
cognitive ˈkɒɡ.nə.tɪv C1	adjective - Connected with thinking, knowing, remembering, and mental processes.
spawned spɔːnd C2	verb - To produce, generate, or cause something to develop suddenly.
epiphany ɪˈpɪf.ən.i C2	noun - A sudden, powerful, and clear realization or understanding of something.
conflate kənˈfleɪt C2	verb - To combine two or more separate things, ideas, or concepts into one.
capability ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ə.ti B2	noun - The ability, capacity, or power to do something.
numb nʌm C1	adjective - Unable to feel or react physically or emotionally; desensitized.
suppress səˈpres B2	verb - To prevent something from being expressed, known, or felt.
evolution ˌiː.vəˈluː.ʃən B2	noun - The process of gradual development, especially from a simple to a more complex form.
turbocharged ˈtɜː.bəʊ.tʃɑːdʒd C2	adjective - Extremely fast, powerful, or greatly enhanced.
epidemic ˌep.ɪˈdem.ɪk B2	noun - A sudden, widespread occurrence of an undesirable phenomenon.
outrage ˈaʊt.reɪdʒ B2	noun - A strong feeling of anger and shock.
disengagement ˌdɪs.ɪnˈɡeɪdʒ.mənt C1	noun - The state of being uncoupled, disconnected, or no longer involved with something.
polarization ˌpəʊ.lər.aɪˈzeɪ.ʃən C1	noun - Division into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions.
humble ˈhʌm.bəl B2	adjective - Not proud or arrogant; modest or respectful.
regenerate rɪˈdʒen.ə.reɪt C1	verb - To bring new and more vigorous life, strength, or activity to something.
sublime səˈblaɪm C2	adjective - Of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.
compassion kəmˈpæʃ.ən B2	noun - Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.