The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say 'I love you.' And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them.
It's a common mistake to speak the same to everybody. We all have different filters.
Ears are made not for hearing but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something that we have to work at - it's a relationship with sound. And yet, it's a skill that none of us are taught.
Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.
Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition.
Listening is a crucial aspect of democracy. Listening creates understanding, and understanding permits one of the most important things about every democracy, which is civilized disagreement.
I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.
For the great speakers, it's all about the audience. And the feeling they have is that they're giving a gift, of maybe knowledge or inspiration or motivation.
My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, 'It's October 1 today,' and she said, 'I know, isn't it dreadful?' It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.
A sonic logo on its own isn't going to do very much. We get frustrated with smaller brands who come to us and say, 'We need a bing-bong'. You just can't encapsulate a brand for £500 in a three-second sound. It doesn't work.
Sound is complex; there are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.
We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority.
Every individual's listening is as unique as his or her fingerprints because we all listen through filters that develop from our personal mix of culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations and intentions. That is why one person's musical taste is another person's hideous noise.
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again. If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet; that's absolutely fine.
It is a mistake to assume that everyone listens like you do: your listening is as unique as your fingerprints, and so is everyone else's.
The Hindus say, 'Nada brahma,' one translation of which is, 'The world is sound.' And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating.
A great deal of our work involves switching music off.
You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. I have a tip for you: if you work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, with a soothing sound like birdsong. Put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be.
It's an interesting door opening, this use of sonic signalling - using sound to alert us in a more subtle way than a beep.
We spend all our time teaching reading and writing. We spend absolutely no time at all, in most schools, teaching either speaking or, more importantly still, listening.
