| Recorded at | July 21, 2009 |
|---|---|
| Event | TEDGlobal 2009 |
| Duration (min:sec) | 05:26 |
| Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
| Words per minute | 241.43 very fast |
| Readability (FK) | 61.5 easy |
| Speaker | Julian Treasure |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Description | sound consultant |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices.
| 1 | 00:16 | Over the next five minutes, | ||
| 2 | 00:17 | my intention is to transform your relationship with sound. | ||
| 3 | 00:21 | Let me start with the observation | ||
| 4 | 00:22 | that most of the sound around us is accidental; | ||
| 5 | 00:25 | much of it is unpleasant. (Traffic noise) | ||
| 6 | 00:27 | We stand on street corners, shouting over noise like this, | ||
| 7 | 00:30 | pretending it doesn't exist. | ||
| 8 | 00:31 | This habit of suppressing sound has meant | ||
| 9 | 00:33 | that our relationship with sound has become largely unconscious. | ||
| 10 | 00:36 | There are four major ways sound is affecting you all the time, | ||
| 11 | 00:39 | and I'd like to raise them in your consciousness today. | ||
| 12 | 00:42 | The first is physiological. | ||
| 13 | 00:44 | (Alarm clocks ring) | ||
| 14 | 00:47 | Sorry about that. | ||
| 15 | 00:48 | I just gave you a shot of cortisol, your fight-flight hormone. | ||
| 16 | 00:51 | Sounds are affecting your hormone secretions all the time, | ||
| 17 | 00:53 | but also your breathing, heart rate -- which I just also did -- | ||
| 18 | 00:57 | and your brainwaves. | ||
| 19 | 00:58 | It's not just unpleasant sounds like that that do it. | ||
| 20 | 01:01 | This is surf. (Ocean waves) | ||
| 21 | 01:02 | It has the frequency of roughly 12 cycles per minute. | ||
| 22 | 01:05 | Most people find that very soothing, | ||
| 23 | 01:06 | and, interestingly, 12 cycles per minute is roughly the frequency | ||
| 24 | 01:09 | of the breathing of a sleeping human, | ||
| 25 | 01:11 | so there is a deep resonance with being at rest. | ||
| 26 | 01:14 | We also associate it with being stress-free and on holiday. | ||
| 27 | 01:17 | The second way in which sound affects you is psychological. | ||
| 28 | 01:20 | Music is the most powerful form of sound that we know | ||
| 29 | 01:23 | that affects our emotional state. (Albinoni's Adagio) | ||
| 30 | 01:25 | This is guaranteed to make most of you feel pretty sad if I leave it on. | ||
| 31 | 01:29 | Music is not the only kind of sound, however, which affects your emotions. | ||
| 32 | 01:32 | Natural sound can do that, too. | ||
| 33 | 01:34 | Birdsong, for example, is a sound which most people find reassuring. | ||
| 34 | 01:38 | There's a reason: over hundreds of thousands of years | ||
| 35 | 01:40 | we've learned that when the birds are singing, things are safe. | ||
| 36 | 01:43 | It's when they stop you need to be worried. | ||
| 37 | 01:45 | The third way in which sound affects you is cognitively. | ||
| 38 | 01:48 | You can't understand two people talking at once (Voice-over) | ||
| 39 | 01:51 | or in this case, one person talking twice. | ||
| 40 | 01:53 | You have to choose which me you're going to listen to. | ||
| 41 | 01:55 | We have a very small amount of bandwidth for processing auditory input, | ||
| 42 | 01:59 | which is why noise like this ... | ||
| 43 | 02:00 | (Office noise) | ||
| 44 | 02:01 | is extremely damaging for productivity. | ||
| 45 | 02:03 | If you have to work in an open-plan office like this, | ||
| 46 | 02:06 | your productivity is greatly reduced. | ||
| 47 | 02:08 | And whatever number you're thinking of, it probably isn't as bad as this. | ||
| 48 | 02:11 | [Open-plan offices productivity down 66%] | ||
| 49 | 02:15 | You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. | ||
| 50 | 02:18 | I have a tip for you: | ||
| 51 | 02:20 | if you work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, | ||
| 52 | 02:22 | with a soothing sound like birdsong. | ||
| 53 | 02:24 | Put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be. | ||
| 54 | 02:28 | The fourth way in which sound affects us is behaviorally. | ||
| 55 | 02:31 | With all that other stuff going on, | ||
| 56 | 02:33 | it would be amazing if our behavior didn't change. | ||
| 57 | 02:35 | (Techno music) | ||
| 58 | 02:36 | So ask yourself: Is this person ever going to drive | ||
| 59 | 02:39 | at a steady 28 miles per hour? | ||
| 60 | 02:40 | I don't think so. | ||
| 61 | 02:41 | At the simplest, you move away from unpleasant sound | ||
| 62 | 02:44 | and towards pleasant sounds. | ||
| 63 | 02:46 | So if I were to play this ... | ||
| 64 | 02:47 | (Jackhammer) | ||
| 65 | 02:48 | for more than a few seconds, you'd feel uncomfortable; | ||
| 66 | 02:51 | for more than a few minutes, you'd be leaving the room in droves. | ||
| 67 | 02:54 | For people who can't get away from noise like that, | ||
| 68 | 02:57 | it's extremely damaging for their health. | ||
| 69 | 02:59 | And that's not the only thing that bad sound damages. | ||
| 70 | 03:01 | Most retail sound is inappropriate and accidental, even hostile, | ||
| 71 | 03:04 | and it has a dramatic effect on sales. | ||
| 72 | 03:07 | For you retailers, you may want to look away before I show this slide. | ||
| 73 | 03:10 | [Inappropriate retail soundscapes sales down 28%] | ||
| 74 | 03:12 | They're losing up to 30 percent of their business | ||
| 75 | 03:15 | with people leaving shops faster, or just turning around at the door. | ||
| 76 | 03:18 | We've all done it, left the area, | ||
| 77 | 03:20 | because the sound in there is so dreadful. | ||
| 78 | 03:22 | I want to spend just a moment talking about the model we've developed, | ||
| 79 | 03:25 | which allows us to start at the top and look at the drivers of sound, | ||
| 80 | 03:28 | analyze the soundscape | ||
| 81 | 03:29 | and then predict the four outcomes I just talked about. | ||
| 82 | 03:32 | Or start at the bottom and say what outcomes we want, | ||
| 83 | 03:35 | and then design a soundscape to have a desired effect. | ||
| 84 | 03:38 | At last we've got some science we can apply. | ||
| 85 | 03:40 | And we're in the business of designing soundscapes. | ||
| 86 | 03:42 | Just a word on music. | ||
| 87 | 03:43 | Music is the most powerful sound there is, often inappropriately deployed. | ||
| 88 | 03:47 | It's powerful for two reasons: | ||
| 89 | 03:49 | you recognize it fast, and you associate it very powerfully. | ||
| 90 | 03:52 | I'll give you two examples. | ||
| 91 | 03:53 | (First chord of "A Hard Day's Night") | ||
| 92 | 03:55 | Most of you recognize that immediately. | ||
| 93 | 03:57 | The younger, maybe not. | ||
| 94 | 03:58 | (Laughter) | ||
| 95 | 04:00 | (First notes of "Jaws" theme) | ||
| 96 | 04:01 | Most of you associate that with something! | ||
| 97 | 04:03 | Now, those are one-second samples of music. | ||
| 98 | 04:05 | Music is very powerful, | ||
| 99 | 04:06 | and unfortunately, it's veneering commercial spaces, often inappropriately. | ||
| 100 | 04:10 | I hope that's going to change over the next few years. | ||
| 101 | 04:13 | Let me talk about brands for a moment, since some of you run brands. | ||
| 102 | 04:16 | Every brand is out there making sound right now. | ||
| 103 | 04:19 | There are eight expressions of a brand in sound; they're all important. | ||
| 104 | 04:22 | And every brand needs to have guidelines at the center. | ||
| 105 | 04:25 | I'm glad to say that is starting to happen now. | ||
| 106 | 04:27 | (Intel ad jingle) | ||
| 107 | 04:29 | You all recognize that one. | ||
| 108 | 04:30 | (Nokia ringtone) | ||
| 109 | 04:31 | This is the most-played tune in the world today -- | ||
| 110 | 04:34 | 1.8 billion times a day, that tune is played. | ||
| 111 | 04:36 | (Laughter) | ||
| 112 | 04:37 | And it cost Nokia absolutely nothing. | ||
| 113 | 04:40 | I'll leave you with four golden rules, for those of you who run businesses, | ||
| 114 | 04:43 | for commercial sound. | ||
| 115 | 04:44 | First, make it congruent, | ||
| 116 | 04:46 | pointing in the same direction as your visual communication. | ||
| 117 | 04:49 | That increases impact by over 1,100 percent. | ||
| 118 | 04:52 | If your sound is pointing the opposite direction, incongruent, | ||
| 119 | 04:55 | you reduce impact by 86 percent. | ||
| 120 | 04:57 | That's an order of magnitude, up or down. | ||
| 121 | 04:59 | This is important. | ||
| 122 | 05:01 | Secondly, make it appropriate to the situation. | ||
| 123 | 05:04 | Thirdly, make it valuable. | ||
| 124 | 05:05 | Give people something with the sound, don't just bombard them with stuff. | ||
| 125 | 05:09 | Finally, test and test it again. | ||
| 126 | 05:10 | Sound is complex; there are many countervailing influences. | ||
| 127 | 05:13 | It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: | ||
| 128 | 05:15 | sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens. | ||
| 129 | 05:18 | So I hope this talk has raised sound in your consciousness. | ||
| 130 | 05:20 | If you're listening consciously, | ||
| 131 | 05:22 | you can take control of the sound around you. | ||
| 132 | 05:24 | It's good for your health and for your productivity. | ||
| 133 | 05:27 | If we all do that, we move to a state | ||
| 134 | 05:29 | that I like to think will be sound living in the world. | ||
| 135 | 05:31 | I'll leave you with more birdsong. (Birds chirping) | ||
| 136 | 05:34 | I recommend at least five minutes a day, but there's no maximum dose. | ||
| 137 | 05:37 | Thank you for lending me your ears today. | ||
| 138 | 05:39 | (Applause) |