used to slow your heart and your breathing, and create physiological calmness.
TIP: If you ever have problems sleeping, I suggest playing the sound of gentle surf with about 6-10 cycles per minute in your bedroom. This rhythm and tempo is very like the sound of the breathing of a sleeping person and will entrain your breathing and promote rest; also, we tend to associate this sound with being carefree and relaxed and with natural tranquility, so it works on many levels.
From the moment you wake (preferably to something much gentler than the traditional startling alarm clock bell or beep) to the moment you retire, sound plays a significant role in your physiology, affecting your heart, your breathing, your hormone secretions and even your brain waves.
PSYCHOLOGICAL
The second way sound affects us is by changing our feelings, moods and emotions.
The clearest example of this is music. Take a moment to think of your favourite song. I’m joining you by thinking of mine, which is River Man by Nick Drake. As your song plays in your mind and you listen with imaginary ears, you may notice a shift in your mood. Music is a very powerful conveyor of emotion, and most people know how to use it deliberately either to counteract a feeling they would rather not have, or to enhance one they are enjoying. The process may be intuitive, but it’s also complex because music involves many factors: tempo and rhythm; timbre and dynamics; melody and harmony; and for vocal music lyrics and singing style too. Some of these are cultural; for example, the melancholic association of minor keys is strong in the classic European and American tradition, but far weaker in the Middle East, where some very happy music uses the minor mode.
On top of this, like all sound, music works powerfully by association. These associations may be global, like those evinced by the first 2 notes of John Williams’s famous theme from the film Jaws (I bet you just imagined them and thought of a shark!); they may be local, like the social relevance of most folk music; or they may be entirely individual, created by personal emotional experiences that are powerfully tied to a piece of music and rekindled if it is heard again, even years later. Thus, predicting the exact emotional impact of a piece of music on any person or group is very difficult.
What we do know is that human beings have used music for thousands of years to create shared emotional experiences, from tribal rites of passage to religious worship or the modern dance scene. We even use it in war, to give our troops bravery or to intimidate the enemy; that’s what bagpipes were invented for. Never has a human society been discovered, no matter how remote, that did not have music, so it clearly is part of our nature, not spread or learned – though of course styles and songs travel, coalesce and collide constantly, especially in the modern, connected world of YouTube, streaming, downloads and public playlists.
While music is the most obvious type of sound that affects us psychologically, it’s not the only one. My company, The Sound Agency, often installs birdsong-based soundscapes, and for good reason. The birds have been singing for millions of years, and we have learned through the ages that normal birdsong means all is well. We can tell if something alarms the birds, or, even worse, causes them to stop singing altogether – a phenomenon that has often been reported before volcanic eruptions or tsunamis. That’s why normal birdsong makes most people feel safe, even if they are not conscious of this effect. Birdsong is also nature’s alarm clock, telling us that it’s time to be awake and thus promoting alertness, so this combination of security and wakefulness makes birdsong a very useful sound for working, along with many other activities. Just recently, research has shown that it’s also effective in aiding recovery from illness, so it seems that we instinctively like birdsong for some very good reasons.
The latest thinking about the multi-layered process of sound affecting emotions comes from academics in a paper from Lund University in Sweden. It proposes 6 component pathways in the process. In ascending order of complexity and subtlety, here they are.
Brain stem reflex is the physiological effect discussed above, most importantly the fight/flight reflex. Sounds that are sudden, loud, dissonant, or feature fast patterns tend to induce emotional arousal.
Evaluative conditioning is the associative response we considered above. You associate a sound or song with something, maybe a person or event, and that thing creates the emotion.
Emotional contagion is where we receive the emotion the composer poured into a song because we perceive it – in just the same way that seeing someone crying may make us sad. This puts me in mind of the hilarious scene in the film Bridget Jones, where Bridget is wallowing in self-pity and singing along with Jamie O’Neal’s version of Eric Carmen’s classic All By Myself.
Visual imagery involves conjuring up visual images while listening to the sound, so that emotions arise from the combination of the sound and the imagined scene. This is at least partly the process in play if you use gentle surf to relax or lull yourself to sleep.
Episodic memory is where the sound evokes a memory of a particular event in the listener’s life and the event creates the emotion (sometimes referred to as the “Darling, they’re playing our tune” phenomenon). Post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers may react strongly to the sound of thunder or any sudden bang for this reason.
Music expectancy happens where a feature of the musical structure violates, delays, or confirms the listener’s expectations based on previous experiences of the same style of music. Composers have used this for hundreds of years, playfully taking us down a path and then catching us out with an unexpected twist that causes surprise or delight.
Remember, all sound can affect your feelings, not just music.
COGNITIVE
The third effect of sound is on our ability to think, with dramatic effects on our productivity or effectiveness. This mainly because we have quite limited neural bandwidth when it comes to processing sound.
I have never met anyone who can understand 2 people speaking at the same time. Scouring the available scientific evidence, I have calculated that we have auditory bandwidth for around 1.6 human conversations. This feels about right intuitively; most of us know the feelings of overwhelm, frustration and maybe irritation that arise when 2 people are talking at us simultaneously, or when we’re trying to work on a deadline and someone near us is talking loudly.
As you may have noticed, we have no earlids, so unless you don headphones there is no way of shutting out distracting sound. In addition, we are programmed to decode language so a nearby conversation takes up one of our precious 1.6 bandwidth, leaving us only 0.6 to listen to the internal voice we use when we’re trying to work with words, symbols or numbers. That’s why another person’s conversation is the most distracting sound of all.
Research on people working in modern open-plan offices has revealed that variable or unpredictable sounds are the most distracting, especially when we have no control over them. After unwanted conversation, the most commonly cited nuisances are ringing phones and office machinery like printers or other people’s computers. This kind of noise degrades our ability to think, often dramatically: productivity can be reduced by two thirds in noisy open-plan offices! One survey of 1,800 home and office workers in the UK found that they were losing up to 2 hours a day to interruptions from noise, mainly from loud colleagues and ringing phones. The estimated cost to the UK economy was £139 billion a year!
Office expert Professor Jeremy Myerson has written extensively on this issue. He points out that we have different work modes, and that open-plan suits only one of them – collaboration, or team-based working, where the main objective is fast communication so it’s acceptable to interrupt neighbours without warning. When I interviewed him for a BBC Radio documentary on this topic, Myerson noted that this kind of working open-plan is like frontier territory in its lack of social rules. As he said: “The postman
