How to be Heard. Julian Treasure

       Introduction

      Sound has always been my primary connection with the world. In my childhood in South West London we lived by parks and later a river, and I remember listening with wonder at night to the sound of gentle summer rain outside my window, or looking up in woodland walks and being transported by the sound of wind rustling lush Spring leaves together in rich, fascinating waves. It was inevitable that music became a passion from the start; I spent many hours in darkened rooms listening studiously through cherished headphones to a fast-growing collection of precious vinyl. Becoming a musician was the natural next step, and my parents were tolerant enough to buy my first drum kit and bear the pounding from my bedroom as I tried to emulate heroes like John Bonham and Bill Bruford.

      Many paradiddles and many bands later, I sold my magazine publishing business and at last had the chance to unify my work with my passion for sound. I had spent more than 15 years helping brands to create written content that would engage, enlighten and entertain their customers – all the while continuing to play and make music in my spare time. Now I wanted to help those same organisations to make sound that was appropriate, effective and beautiful, both in their marketing and in the spaces they managed, from offices to banks, shops, malls and airports. And so The Sound Agency was born in 2003, its mission to prove that good sound was good business.

      The Sound Agency was always about sound, not just music; in fact, we have spent a lot of time removing mindless music from places where it was playing inappropriately and upsetting people. To develop a robust modus operandi that applied not only art and aesthetics but also science and technology, I read papers, journals and books, initially about the psychology of music, and then about the greater subject of sound and how it affects human beings. We started to ask the question “How does your brand sound?” with increasing understanding and experience, and then I created a set of models and tools that allowed us to map the effects of all sorts of sound on employees, customers and prospects.

      In 2007 I pulled all this thinking together into a book, inevitably entitled Sound Business, which became a respected textbook for audio branding agencies and their clients alike, helping them to explore this exciting new territory of intentional, designed sound. Two years later, I got the chance to speak at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, albeit with the challenge of condensing everything I’d learned about sound into 6 minutes! That talk led to 4 more in successive years, all of them subsequently published as videos on the TED website. As I created them, my focus shifted from sound in business to sound in human interaction – in other words, to listening and speaking.

      For many years, I had known that very few people listened well. This was clear from the blank faces we usually met when trying to sell The Sound Agency’s services: every major brand has a book defining it, many of them as thick as a Bible and even referred to as ‘brand bibles’ – and none of them contain any pages at all about sound. Our society is crashingly ocular. The business managers we met didn’t think at all about the sound their organisations made, so each time before we could start selling our wares, we had to have a short, transformative conversation, explaining how sound affects people and why the management need to be listening. This conversation is what eventually formed the core of my first TED talk, and it usually resulted in an astonished expression and the phrase: “Now you say it, this is so obvious, but we’ve never thought about it before!” You may well encounter that little paradox yourself at points in this book, and you will be in good company. Most of the top managers I’ve met at major companies have had exactly this experience. I remember presenting to the CEO of British Airports Authority when London Heathrow’s beautiful Terminal 5 was in the early stages of construction. Like many successful senior managers, he was open to challenge and grasped big ideas fast. About 5 minutes into my passionate description of how sound affects people, he stopped me and said: “I cannot believe we’re about to spend 4 billion pounds on a new building, and we have never asked: ‘How will it sound?’”

      I gradually realised that what’s true for people running brands is just as true of all of us in every aspect of our lives. Most people do not listen much at all. And when I started thinking about human communication I saw the full extent of the tyranny of the eyes: not only do we not listen well, we don’t speak well either. Somewhere along the way, our oldest, most natural, powerful and effective mode of communication got taken for granted, devalued and then left behind as the world became ever-noisier and technology beguiled our eyes and appropriated our fingers too.

      People have always been scared of public speaking, but now it seems we have a generation scared of private speaking too. Research shows

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