Room to Think
Room to Think explores how the spaces we live and work in shape how we think, feel, and function.
Hosted by Lyssia Katan, Head of Brand at LiLi Tile, the podcast features conversations with world-class architects, designers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and cultural thinkers. Together, they unpack how light, layout, materials, sound, and spatial decisions influence stress, focus, creativity, and wellbeing, and share practical insights you can apply in your own home or workspace.
New episodes drop on Tuesdays. Follow Room to Think on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Room to Think
Designing for Quiet
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In this episode, Lyssia sits down with Julian Treasure, leading expert on sound, communication, and the power of listening, to explore something most of us rarely think about: how the sounds around us shape the way we feel, focus, communicate, and live.
Julian explains why sound deserves just as much attention in design as color, texture, lighting, and layout. We may stop consciously noticing the hum of an HVAC system, traffic outside the window, or conversations happening around us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean our brains have stopped processing them. He breaks down why the human voice is one of the most distracting sounds, why open-plan offices can make it harder to concentrate, and why the spaces we spend our time in are often designed for the eyes while largely ignoring the ears.
The conversation also explores the hidden effects of living in an increasingly noisy world. Julian discusses how noise can affect sleep, stress, productivity, hearing, and health, and why restaurants, offices, schools, and even our homes can become louder than we realize. They also discuss whether noise-canceling headphones are really a solution, why natural sounds like birdsong can help create a better environment, and what architects and designers can do to make spaces more acoustically comfortable.
Most importantly, this episode offers a practical way to start listening to your own space. Julian shares a simple exercise for evaluating any room by asking three questions: Is it healthy? Is it helpful? And does it make me happy? From quieter appliances and better acoustic treatments to curtains, ceilings, and the sounds we choose to surround ourselves with, small changes can completely shift the experience of a room.
Because sometimes the biggest problem in a space isn’t what you see. It’s what you hear.
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Julian Treasure
Website: https://www.juliantreasure.com/
Communication Skills Assessment: https://studio.com/apps/juliantreasure/mcc?ref=juliantreasure&code=a
The Listening Society: https://www.thelisteningsociety.community/
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Cold Open: The Voice Problem
Julian TreasureThe number one most distracting sound of all is the human voice.
Lyssia KatanWhat is that doing?
Julian TreasureHearing damage is only one aspect of the damage that noise does to us. Noise is the number one problem in open plan offices today.
Lyssia KatanIs that really a solution, or is it just a band-aid on the problem?
Julian TreasureYou can design with sound just as much as you can design with sight, with colours and shapes and textures and so forth. And that's really exciting for a lot of architects. Sound is a very intimate sense because sound waves go inside your head, they touch you. Almost nobody understands that listening is a skill. Severe noise can kill.
Lyssia KatanWhat if the sound of your home is affecting you more than you realize? Welcome to Room Nothing. Today I'm sitting down with Julian Treasure. He's one of the world's leading experts on sound and listening. Julian's Tedocks have been viewed more than 150 million times. And his work explores something most of us rarely ever think about: how the sounds around us shape the way we feel, focus, communicate, and live. We talk about why restaurants have gotten so loud, what constant background noise is doing to our bodies, whether noise canceling headphones are really the solution, and the simple changes that can make your home sound so much better. Because sometimes the biggest problem in a room
Why Sound Shapes Our Lives
Lyssia Katanisn't what you see, it's what you hear. Let's get into it. Julian, I am so excited to have you on the show. Julian Treasure is a leading expert on sound communication and the power of listening. Through his best-selling books, global talks, and viral TED presentations, he explores how sound shapes our well-being, our relationships, and the way we experience the spaces around us. His TED Talks have been viewed more than 150 million times, making him one of the world's most widely heard voices on sound and communication. Julian, welcome to Room to Think.
Julian TreasureWell, thank you so much. It's an absolute delight to be here.
Lyssia KatanSo for someone who knows or has seen your TED Talks, but doesn't really know you or who you are, what you do, how would you explain what it is you do and why you've dedicated so much of your life to sound?
Julian TreasureWell, sound's been a huge part of my life ever since. I think probably six years old, my mother bought me a young person's guide to the orchestra, an LP, which I loved. And from that moment on, music was very central to me. And so I went through Carnival of the Animals and Peter the Wolf and all the kind of children's classics that my mother was happy to supply me with. As I got older, obviously the music changed. And I learned to play first keyboard, then drums, then I was in bands, and I became a musician for a while. So music has been a thread, and it still is. You know, I I I find it very difficult if I'm speaking to somebody and there's music on. My brain's going, listen to the music. And I find it hard to be present to the conversation. So music is absolutely at the core of my being. But playing in bands, I think gives you a different listening. So you have to I do do you play an instrument?
Lyssia KatanI played the violin growing up, but very shortly, maybe two years.
Julian TreasureEver in a band or an orchestra?
Lyssia KatanYeah. In in elementary and middle school.
Julian TreasureOkay, well then you'll you'll know that as a musician playing in a group of any kind, you have to listen to all the other players at the same time in order to be playing appropriately and um to fit in with whatever's happening. And you know, if you're reading the code that uh musicians read on a bit of paper, which is dots on a stave, uh, you're also doing some quite complicated mental work, as well as a very complicated physical thing at the same time. So your brain is lit up like a Christmas tree. I mean, it's it's fully on for musicians when they're playing, uh, which is why musicians, incidentally, have bigger brains than non-musicians. The corpus callosum, the bit of the brain that links the two hemispheres together, is more developed in musicians. It's quite significant. So I grew up with music. I started that kind of very intense, uh multi-track, very attentive listening as a musician. And that stayed with me all the way through a career in initially advertising, then marketing. I was an entrepreneur. I started a magazine publishing company producing customer magazines for big brands. And all the way
Julian’s Path Through Music
Julian Treasurethrough this, I was talking to marketing directors, looking at their brand books, you know, great big Bible-sized books about how the brand was perceived. How many pages about sound? None. Never any pages about sound. So I was thinking, why don't these people even ask the question, how does our brand sound? So eventually I sold that magazine publishing company, and I was able to bring the two halves of me together, I guess, and I formed a company called the Sound Agency, which I then ran for 20 years, which was an audio branding company asking exactly that question and helping brands to make sound that was appropriate and effective. I mean, every brand's making sound. It's just that it's accidental, unplanned, unthought about, and probably negative because of that. So, you know, we live in a world we we can come on to talk about noise in a moment, but you know, we live in a world that's very noisy, and a lot of that noise is like the exhaust gas of the economy. It's just being made by people doing stuff and doing commerce largely. And a lot of that sound is very negative. So that's what uh the audio branding thesis was, and that's what I did for 20 years, and I wrote a book called Sound Business, and in writing that I kind of developed a model because I really thought deeply and did a lot of research about the power of sound. You know, the question was: sound is important. Why is it important? And I discovered it affects us all in four powerful ways, and I wrote that up, and that was the kind of core of that book, and then lots of ways that companies can use sound in effective and productive ways, in especially in physical spaces. Uh and I then stopped doing the sound agency about what two, three years ago in order to really become a full-time writer, because I'd I'd had the chance to do the TED talks along the way. Started going to TED back in 2003, when I sold my first company, um, because I knew Chris Anderson a little bit from the same background magazine publishing in the UK. That's where he came from. That's where I came from. And he said, I've bought this thing, you should come and look at it. And I did, and I fell in love with Ted. So then I got the chance, I think it was 2009, was the first one, I got the chance to do a TED talk about the four effects of sound, and then I did another one about sound and health, and then one about listening, then one about architects designing with their ears, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a moment, and then the final one was about speaking, which is the one that went completely ballistic. But interestingly, I think it's the sixth most viewed TED talk of all time now. Interestingly, my talk about speaking has been seen by six times as many people as my talk about listening, which says something to me. And so over the period of doing those talks, I kind of answered my question about why is it that organizations
Listening As A Learnable Skill
Julian Treasuredon't think about the sound they're making? And even now, very few will have a brand book that's got any pages about sound at all. And the answer it's transpired, or I realized, is that it's because organizations are full of people who are not listening. Full stop. In fact, I have a quote by Hemingway that I always use in my talks, or very often use in my talks, where he says, most people never listen. And that sadly is the truth. Most people don't, but almost everybody thinks they do. So we have a massive kind of wall of denial here. It's a huge gap. You know, if you say to somebody, do you know what, you're not a very good listener, they'll get quite offended because we all like to think that we listen well. It's part of being a nice person, isn't it, really? However, the the truth is that very, very few people actually do listen well. Almost nobody understands that listening is a skill that you can practice, master, and develop. And it it's work. It takes effort. So that unfortunately is equally true of the professions who design the spaces in which we live, work, heal, play, uh learn. Uh and they are not listening either. I think American architects train for five years, and they're lucky if they spend more than a couple of days in that time on sound. Same with interior designers. So we live in a world that's covered in hard surfaces, reflective to sound just as much as they are to light. And in many, many spaces we are trying to get on in spaces that are simply not fit for purpose. They don't work because of the sound in them. So that's where I've ended up. My my passion, my my mission in the world now is to regenerate the world's listening. Because it all starts with listening, Lysia. That's the heart of it. You know, if we can teach I mean, we don't tilt teach our children how to listen, which to me is crazy. We teach them how to read and write, not how to speak and listen. I mean, what's that about? But if we could just teach architects to think about, to design with their ears, to think about the experience of the spaces they're creating, not just how they look, but how they sound and indeed, you know, smell, touch, taste. I mean, they're all the senses are in play. Especially now we understand that the world is full of very diverse people, neurodiverse apart from anything else. And many, many people are actually extremely sensitive to noise. So uh if we could just teach this, what a different world we'd be creating.
Lyssia KatanAaron Powell It's interesting that you say that it's never been taught because I mean I know in school reading, writing, like you mentioned, is top priority. I didn't take a class on public speaking until college. And even then, my professor, Stanley Ridgeley, fantastic man, he filmed us and recorded us speaking, and only then did we even hear what we sounded like. And he was able to correct certain things like vocal fry or uptick. And and most people, the class was maybe eight people. Majority of people haven't heard themselves speaking, but they hear themselves all the time.
Julian TreasureSpeaking and listening, especially in an AI world, remain the most important way in which two human beings can actually connect and form a relationship and share something of their humanity. You know, I do hope, I have a I have a a cherished belief that AI will never actually be able to do that. Because, you know, the AI wasn't born. It didn't bang its knee when it was three years old, it didn't get upset and have and cry in school because somebody was mean to it and blah, blah, blah. You know, the the things we have all been through as human beings, it doesn't have that experience. It can try to emulate it. But I I do believe that a human connection, a heart connection between two people relies on speaking and listening. And that's where so many young people are struggling right now. We have an epidemic of loneliness, depression, suicide, all sorts of uh terrible things are happening, especially to the young, to the digital natives, because they will prefer to communicate with text. And it's not the same. It is not the way that you form deep relationships with other people. So yeah, I think speaking and listening is the big miss, and that's where my work is focused.
Lyssia KatanAt what point did you notice that that sound was affecting people? Did you feel it in yourself in a particularly loud room? Or did you see it in others?
Julian TreasureWell, I it started with music, as I said, for me. So I would I was always conscious that music had an incredibly powerful effect on me and on many other people. I mean, there are people who are immune to music who don't like it. Not many, uh, because being musical is is part of being human. You know, we've never discovered a tribe anywhere in the world that hasn't developed music, however cut off from the rest of humanity they've been. So music springs up from humanity. We're not the only species that sings, obviously, but it is fundamental to us. And if you believe Stephen Mython with his lovely book, The Singing Neanderthals, it's how we communicated before we invented language, which is only what a hundred thousand years. I mean, half of the development of Homo sapiens, we had no language, at least half. And so we would communicate with sound, and music, perhaps, singing, chanting, humming, you know, whatever it was, but it was vocal. So this is primal, and uh it it's it's the most impactful way in which we can communicate. So, yes, I mean I was conscious of the power of it for me and for other people from a very young age. And as I went through that career in marketing, you know, this question came up, and I I just couldn't understand how all these people could ignore the power of what they're doing. You know, I'd walk into the reception of a big company where they'd have a TV on in reception showing news. Well, news is always bad in the first place, and then there are commercials quite often in there which might be a competing brand advertising into your reception. You know, I've seen that happen many times. And why people think bad news is going to make for good meetings, I have no idea. You know, so that kind of mindless and don't get me started on piping music into uh every environment in the world. You know, there's now a great deal of research about music in retail particularly, for obvious reasons, because there's a return on it and people know quite well what well there's a there's a it's a very complex subject, and people the the academics do know what's going on there, but unfortunately the vast number of people who run shops don't look at the research and have no idea what they're doing. They just do a knee-jerk thing of playing jollipop music because everybody else does. And very often they're actually shortening uh dwell time in their in their shops and pissing people off. So um, you know, these things, sound is is powerful, is important, and is widely understood or under not thought about in the right way.
Lyssia KatanThat's funny you said I because I've actually left a store before because the music was so bad and I just didn't buy anything. And it's interesting. You've said in the past that you would never run a shop that smelled terrible, but so many people run buildings that sound horrible. Why isn't anyone noticing this? Is this just something that we've become
Why Open Plan Offices Fail
Lyssia Katanalmost immune to? Like, for example, the sound of the HVAC unit or construction. Do we just get used to it?
Julian TreasureI'm afraid we do, yes. We habituate and particularly with constant sounds. So you mentioned HVAC. I mean, you you might identify with the feeling at six o'clock when the HVAC turns off and everybody goes, whoa, I didn't even know that was on. And suddenly, you know, this weight is lifted. And now your brain has been going all day, your brain's been going, I'm not listening to that. I'm still not listening to that. So there is work going on. You're not conscious of it, but it is being filtered, and there's work going on. So there's effort. And even a constant sound like that, which we cease to become conscious of, uh, that has an effect on us. Uh, and obviously much more distracting than things like that are sudden sounds, a banging door, a ringing phone, you know, I mean, the ultimate would be a baby crying where we're genetically programmed to do something about that, and it's not my baby and I can't touch it, and you know, have you sat next to one on a long-haul flight, for goodness sake? I mean, this is not a comfortable scenario. So um all of these sounds have a big impact. And the and the number one, of course, the number one most distracting sound of all is the human voice. Because we're programmed to decode language. We have no earlids. And so if you're trying to work in an open plan office and somebody behind you is talking about their great night out last night, you're completely screwed. I mean, you can't not listen to them. And they are taking up, I've calculated we have bandwidth for about 1.6 human conversations. There's almost nobody who can understand two people talking simultaneously. You'd have to flip between them and you're missing bits all the time. You can't take in that much data. Uh, bandwidth for audio is actually quite narrow. And therefore, that one person behind you is taking out one of your 1.6, which reduces your capability enormously, because you need to listen to the voice in your head when you're writing, thinking, strategizing, calculating, whatever it is. And that's why people in open plan offices can be as little as one-third as productive as they would be in quiet spaces. It's also why huge numbers of people enjoyed WFH when COVID came along. And, you know, it was a terrible experience, but it gave people a lot of people an excuse to go home and get out of the noise. Now, obviously, that depends on how your home is relative to the office. You know, if you've got seven kids and dogs and noisy neighbours, you'd rather be in the office, I think. But for a lot of people, they suddenly found that they could be far more productive because it was quiet at home. And in you know, in the office they're in this desk with people all around them talking, and it was so distracting. So, yeah, noise has all of these impacts on us, and we need to think these things through in every environment. I mean, office is the biggest one, probably. Uh there is something like six billion square feet of open plan office in the world now, and millions and millions of people are consigned to that existence, you know. And there's only one reason for putting people in open plan. It's dressed up as, oh, it's great for collaboration, eyelines, you know, blah, blah, blah. But actually the reason is density. Because you can cram a lot more people into an office if you put them in open plan than if they're in their own spaces. And therefore, it's in inverted commas more productive. But actually it isn't. You might get three times as many people in, but if they're all one-third as productive, you're not gaining much, are you? So we have to think about the impact on people's well-being, productivity, and happiness. You know, their their their enjoyment, job satisfaction. Noise is the number one problem in open plan offices today. And a lot of the managers unfortunately don't uh they're not cognizant of this because they're tucked away in their nice little private offices, so they don't experience it. And you don't get people standing up and going, I can't stand this, will everybody be quiet? People just leave or they get sick, absenteeism goes up, engagement goes down. Uh i it is just not a healthy or productive environment. And we even know now from research that even for collaboration, a lot of people don't enjoy it. They'd rather send an email to somebody across the desk, because we don't like being overheard. A lot of people don't like that experience. So a lot of people would rather communicate quietly. And you know, the the the most precious space in most buildings now is the quiet working space, which often is a a meeting room that people will go. Camping quietly, or they'll just go home. So your collaborations disappeared there. So that's one space that I could talk about for a long time. I did a BBC Radio 4 documentary a few years ago called The
Practical Acoustic Design Fixes
Julian TreasureCurse of Open Plan, so you can tell what I think about it.
Lyssia KatanWhat about the dividers and the sound-absorbing separators?
Julian TreasureAaron Ross Powell Well they help. Obviously, if you are starting to install acoustic treatments, then somebody is thinking about this, which is a good sign generally. And uh you can ameliorate a lot of this with careful acoustics. I mean, certainly you want to start by looking up because the ceiling is the biggest usable space in any room. A lot of um acousticians refer to it now as the fifth wall. I mean it it's uh it's a huge space and people don't walk on it. Nobody's interactive interacting with it at all. So you can really use it. And there are many things you can do on the ceiling which are a lot more interesting than old-fashioned square grid acoustic panels. You don't have to do that. There are now all sorts of things you can do. Even with you know, an exposed deck, you can suspend clouds, rafts, all sorts of colours, all sorts of shapes. You can use spray-on. I've been working with a a British company who are very innovative with a spray-on product that's made from recycled newspaper and works extremely well. Uh and so there are lots of things you can do with the ceiling to damp down reverberation inside of a large space. You can also, of course, use carpet. And anything that's going to break the sound waves up, it could be bookshelves, it could be plants, anything irregular helps because it breaks up and stops unpleasant reflections from bouncing back and forth. What we don't want is parallel walls, parallel ceiling and floor, and all hard surfaces. That is really nasty. And I'm I'm glad to say in the talks I've been doing for the last few years, uh, I've done a CEU to the American Institute of Architects each year, sponsored by Armstrong Ceilings every year. And that's had a we've had a thousand architects turning up to that. And the response has been really positive. And they're starting to look at things like uh non-square uh parallel walls and parallel surfaces anywhere in the room. So starting to use angles to break up the kind of um standing waves that can happen with parallel surfaces. Uh so I think, you know, we are starting to get traction. We are starting to see. I'm not saying our tech architects don't care. They do care. They care very much. And the problem is they've never been taught. So as soon as they learn, I think they get quite excited about having this new thing they can play with. You can design with sound just as much as you can design with sight, with you know, with colours and shapes and textures and so forth. Uh, and that's really exciting for a lot of architects, particularly now, as I said earlier, they've got the pressure on them of neurodiverse people uh now having, you know, some voice in the world and saying, hey, you know, you need to think about us, and it's not one size fits all. In fact, that's never been the case. But now we're starting to understand it. That I mean it's a big problem with design, isn't it? That you can't just design for one person. Everybody's different. Everybody has different sensitivities. And you've got people, you know, even if you ignore for a moment the neurodiverse, you've got people with hyperacusis, people with misophonia, you've got people with tinnitus, you've got people uh on any given day who've got an ear infection or something. The uh research from a wonderful man I've been working with in the UK called Marion Marionkat, who's profoundly deaf, he has cochlear implants, and he's formed a company called Sound Effects, S-O-W-N-D effects. And he's started a certification for spaces in the UK, bronze, silver, and gold certifications for how audio-inclusive they are. Now, that's a wonderful thing, because it's just like putting a ramp in for people who are using wheelchairs. Well, everybody gains from that because you've got luggage or whatever it is, everybody's happy. And it's in the same direction that if you make a space audio-inclusive, everybody gains. Not
Audio Inclusion And Neurodiversity
Julian Treasurejust the people who are particularly sensitive. Although his research indicates that almost two-thirds of the population on any given day is sensitive to noise. It's not a tiny minority. You're talking about a huge number of people here. So get it right for the very sensitive people, and everybody will be happier, healthier, and more productive.
Lyssia KatanThat's what surprises me that you say two-thirds, because I I've had some uh other guests on the podcast, Dr. Katie Padito, she works with very uh neurodiverse individuals and in neurodiverse spaces, Dr. Andan Tatterjee at UPenn neuroesthetics, but they've both spoken about sensory rooms and the spaces that are being created for specifically neurodivergent individuals who are very sensitive. Why is it right now that it's just one specific room in an airport? Why aren't we adopting it collectively as a whole? Is it just because of lack of education or is it lack of budget? Nobody really wants to pay money for this?
Julian TreasureI think that's a fantastic question this year. And it's a very important one. I think that's, you know, it's patronizing and uh it's kind of um categorizing people uh in a not a particularly positive way, to say, we're gonna make a little room for you ones, you you strange people who need extra things. You just go into that little room over there, and it becomes a little bit um stigmatic, doesn't it? Like a smoking room for the smokers. Ugh, look at those filthy smokers in there. And then we've got a room. Oh, oh, look at that.
Lyssia KatanAnd they're clear too. Yeah. Like an aquarium.
Julian TreasureThere's the room for the people who don't like sound. No. It's good for all of us. And you're absolutely right. This is something that needs to be applied across the board everywhere. It's not okay to create an environment, whether it's an airport, a train station, an office, a hospital, I mean, don't get me started on hospitals, or a school, which sounds terrible. And unfortunately, there are huge numbers of all of those places that sound terrible. And I can only hope that as we start to understand, first, that sound is powerful and affects everybody. Second, that it's actually a majority of the population who are sensitive to sound, not a small minority who can all go into a little room. These are the things we need to understand because this needs to inform all our design for everybody, not just a small minority
Noise-Canceling Headphones And The MBA Rule
Julian Treasureof highly sensitive people.
Lyssia KatanAaron Powell Absolutely. And what about when people take it into their own hands with something like noise canceling headphones, which have become so normal, we even have noise canceling AirPods and all kinds of devices. Is that really a solution, or is it just a band-aid on the problem?
Julian TreasureAaron Powell Well, it solves some of the things for the individual, doesn't it? And you know, there's a lot of things to say about headphones. First of all, we we uh I mean there's a big problem with headphones. Uh headphone abuse, by which I mean playing very loud music for hours a day into your ears, is damaging the hearing of millions and millions and millions of young people. Um the WHO reckons that there'll be a billion people joining the ranks of the hearing impaired because of this problem. And so as they get older anyway, hearing degrades. You know, your hearing gets worse every year, and when you once you hit 50 or 60, you you've lost quite a lot, generally. Not everybody, but most. So, you know, we have a whole generation who've been slaughtering their ears by listening to 100 decibels for hours. You're not supposed to do that. You know, it even at 85 decibels, there's a there's a pretty tight limit on the time exposure. And when you get to 100, it's really minutes, not hours. Uh and they're flattening those little hair cells in their ears, and they don't grow back. Not until we've found some miracle way to do that. Maybe we will in the future. There are people working on it, but so far no. So we are raising an entire deaf generation potentially, which is quite frightening. The rule with headphones is to buy the best headphones you can afford, the highest quality, because then you don't get sucked into the temptation to keep turning it up. Cheap headphones don't give great frequency response. So you keep turning them up to get a bit more bass and a bit more treble. So buy the best ones you can and try to make sure that you can still hear people talking. I mean, not the words, but you can hear the noise of people talking from, say, a meter away. And if you can't hear somebody talking from a meter away, it's probably too loud. And you need to moderate it. I have a a little routine that I teach people who have to work in noisy spaces. I tell them to get an MBA. So it's this is not go to college and become a genius business person. The M stands for move. Now, it's amazing to me how few people actually do that. You know, I see people standing in the street having a shouted conversation next to somebody who's drilling with a steam drill. And I think, why don't you just move? You know? Just walk away. Yeah. Go go somewhere else. So so you know, becoming responsible for the sound you consume is a huge part, I think, of listening, conscious listening, which is what I teach. And so, yes, move. And if you're in an office and you're trying to work and you can't because the people are talking around you, move. Now, if you can't move, let's say there's nowhere you can move to, then the B of MBA is block, and that's the headphones. If you're gonna put headphones on, my suggestion would be to play bird song. It's the sound that we have evolved with wind, water, and birds. It's a sound which most people don't hear in cities. More than half of humanity lives in cities now, and that's it's so sad. Because these are sounds that are good for us. We there's lots of research now showing that the sounds of nature reduce stress and make us feel happy. So they're they're good for us uh physiologically, psychologically. And of course, bird song is a sound that isn't distracting at all. You don't sit listening to the birds, it's just a lovely background noise. We are kind of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have allowed us to do that. Whereas music is largely made to be listened to. So music is saying, listen to me, listen to me, listen to me. Now I'm sure not everybody's like me and can't do anything else if music's going on, but unless you're talking about a specific kind of music that is intentionally made to be background, ambient music, something very repetitive, trance music. But if you're talking about classical music, jazz music, pop music with vocals, they're very distracting forms of sound. So what you're effectively doing is replacing one distraction, which is people talking, with another distraction, which is your choice of music. Now you'll have a much nicer time, I have no doubt, but you won't necessarily be more productive. Now, for you know, parents might have teenagers saying, I I can't do my homework without music on. They won't be more productive with the music on. They might do it, which is a step forward, and they might be able to do it for longer because they're having more fun with the music on, but it does not make you more productive in most cases. Now, I should say everything I say here is tempered by the fact we're all individuals. And there may well be somebody in the world who can work brilliantly with very loud death metal playing. That's not me. But you know, I'm sure there would be somebody. And and our relationship with music is changing um quite rapidly thanks to streaming and mobile music. You know, uh when I grew up, I would sit in a room, darkened room with headphones on with an LP, and you know, after 20 minutes I'd get up and turn it over and I'd listen to it in the order the artist made it. And it was a sort of semi-religious experience. But now the relationship has changed. People will flip from track to track on a playlist that's designed by some algorithm, and a lot of the time they don't even know who the artist is or care. So I do get that our relationship with music is changing considerably. Nevertheless, I think what I'm saying is is still true. Music for most people is quite distracting. So MB, what's the A? If you can't move and you can't block, then you have to accept it. And that's replacing the anger and frustration of how can I possibly be expected to work in this with, okay, this is what it is. I'm just going to do my best and get on with it. So it's acceptance. And that, you know, the anger itself can be a big drain in productivity if you're raging and stumping the desk and so forth. So that's the MBA. And that's the role of headphones to me, if you're talking about productivity. Of course, headphones are wonderful for experiencing beautiful music at high quality. I mean, it's much cheaper to buy a brilliant pair of headphones than it is to buy a brilliant stereo for a room or 5.1 or Atmos or whatever it is you want to put into a room. So it's it's it makes quality music much more accessible, which is great as long as it's done with caution.
Lyssia KatanI would have assumed that the A is ask. Is there any opportunity to be able to ask them to turn the volume down, or are we assuming that this is just there's nothing we can do except control our own decisions?
Julian TreasureI think, well, yes, you can, of course. Uh I've done that before. You have to do it, you know, with grace. There's a difference between a request and a demand, isn't there? So a request is where you're okay with all three outcomes. Yes, no, and I'll think about it. A demand is where any answer other than yes is going to send you into a rage. And you can get into a lot of conflict with people if you demand, you know, that they turn their sound down and they are enjoying it. That's often uh the cause of violence in cities, isn't it, with neighbor noise and so forth. Um so you have to be quite careful with that, I would say. Um, if you if you follow the kind of um best practice of making requests like when your music is playing, I feel this, the the when you I feel kind of formulation, uh maybe you'll get a good response. Maybe you'll get profanity and insults. I don't know. I would just
Why Restaurants Keep Getting Louder
Julian Treasuretake that quite carefully. Um but yes, it's certainly worth asking.
Lyssia KatanI found that in restaurants before, sometimes they were so, or they still are to this day, so loud. And sometimes the staff isn't even aware how loud the music is, and it's hurting their business. So most people are might move, might go to a different restaurant, but I maybe this is not the best practice. But I've told them in the past, hey, like none of these tables, no one can hear each other if you can turn it down just a little bit. And very often they're not aware, but sometimes they don't care, like you said.
Julian TreasureI completely applaud that, and I think it's very important we all do that in restaurants and bars. Because as you say, the staff very often they won't have any choice in it. You know, I've been into I've been in places where you know I walk in, there's nobody else in there, and they put music on. Why have you put that on? I don't want it. Well, we that's the rule. When a customer comes in, this is what we do. And I get particularly uh aggrieved when it's in a space where people are trying to work or talk, like a hotel lobby. You know, there are plenty of cool hotels staffed by people in black suits with um, you know, earpieces where there's pounding music going on in and you've got bench-style seating with people trying to work, speak, think, communicate, and they're having to shout over the top of what's effectively a nightclub. And that's just ridiculous. So it's a question of the people designing the space, not being conscious of it and putting certain things like looking cool or whatever it might be above what people are actually trying to do in the space. I mean, that's the first thing to ask. What are people trying to do in here? What's going to make them happy and more productive in doing that thing? Now, if it's a nightclub, people are trying to dance, and that's great. So you have loud music, hopefully through a very good quality sound system. Of course, for the people working in a nightclub or a bar with loud music, that's a problem. I mean, there are plenty of restaurants and bars in New York. I don't know which city are you in? I'm in Miami, so it's not very different. Okay, well, yeah, that would be the same. Uh there are plenty of bars and restaurants which will have soundscapes when they're full of people of 90 or even 100 decibels, and everybody's shouting at the top of their voice over the music, and of course the sounds of clinking and dishwashing and whatever it might is going on. It's a cacophony. Now, for you or me, we can go in there and even an hour if that's not very good for us, but you know, we won't lose our hearing. But for the people who are working every night, that's a really serious problem. It's very bad for them. It's bad for their ears and it's bad for their stress levels, and it's just not a healthy working environment. They should be offered hearing defenders, ear ear defenders at anything over 85 decibels. I mean, that's what's supposed to happen on a building site, and it should be happening in nightclubs as well. But it doesn't. On building sites, people are generally too proud to wear them, can't be bothered with, you know, they're for weak people. And uh so it's kind of a macho thing not to be wearing them a lot of the time, um, which is tragic because we again, in that profession, there's a huge amount of hearing loss. Um, just as there is in many professions. I mean, even classical musicians, there's a massive problem with hearing loss. Especially, you know, if you're in like second violin sitting right in front of the the brass section, that brass section, when it's playing, is shockingly loud. Many violinists are semi-deaf in their left ear because you're holding the violin and playing it, and that ear is right next to where the sound's coming from. And hours and hours of that, it's not good for you.
Noise Harms Health Beyond Hearing
Julian TreasureSo, you know, we have to think about this in many, many different situations. I mean, hearing damage is only one aspect of the damage that noise does to us. Uh it you can think of it like a pyramid. The base of the pyramid is irritation. You know, there's there's a social effect of noise, which can, as I said, lead to violence. So irritation is is at the bottom, and there's a huge amount of that in the world. One up from that, and very much more serious in terms of health, is sleep deprivation. So there are I think the number uh is something in Europe, something like eight million people who are having their sleep disrupted night after night by traffic noise that's or aircraft noise or rail noise that's way above the World Health Organization recommended maximum levels. That's millions of people who are sleep deprived. That has a massive effect on your health. Of course, you're much more likely to get all sorts of illnesses. But also you're going to be uh having accidents, making mistakes, being irritable. There are all sorts of knock-on effects of these poor people walking about trying to live a life when they haven't had enough sleep. And there's now masses and masses of evidence about how important sleep is for everything. So that's the next level up. Uh on top of that, you have an even more serious level, which is uh a cardiological, well, the whole systemic level of being exposed to I'm not talking about terrifying levels of noise. The level is about 65 decibels. We now know from you know, there's a paper that's summarized all the papers, um, and 65 dB is. Now that's not frightening, but I would have to raise my voice to be heard. I'm not talking about bellowing, but raised voice. It's the average noise level in many classrooms now with group work going on and poor acoustics. And it's the average noise level in a you know a busy, noisy office, even 65 dB would be perfectly feasible to reach. And we now know that being in that with uh over an extended period of time, chronic exposure to 65 dB increases your risk of heart attack, a stroke, of all sorts of physiological impacts. We there's a strong association of noise with so many illnesses, even things like obesity. So, you know, the cancer, various forms of cancers, I mean, there are there is now a great deal of medical evidence about the impact of noise on our health. Now, I just said 65 dB, the average noise level in many classrooms, so it may well be that teachers who are in that environment five days a week, all day, are shortening their lives by working in that environment day after day. And that's pretty shocking. There's already, we know, plenty of teachers have taken legal action, having lost their voice by having to shout constantly over the top of the noise in these terrible, poorly designed classrooms. This can all be changed with acoustic treatments, of course, very quickly and not very expensively. So it's it's a tragedy that it it's still going on. Um, that's almost the top of the pyramid, but at the top of the pyramid you've got death. You know, for somebody who's got a heart condition, for example, and is standing in a station looking the wrong way, when a fast train comes past, the noise of that is shocking. And it could easily bring on a heart attack. So severe noise can kill. And I'm, you know, obviously you you can take that right up to the highest level of a volcano like Krakatoa, which shattered the eardrums. I mean, this is an unbelievable fact. It's in my book, Sound Effects. Um, when Krakatoa erupted, it shattered the eardrums of the crew of a British ship, which was 60 miles away. So the volcano is way over the horizon. You can't see it. And yet the noise at 60 miles distant was so loud that it broke their eardrums. So, yes, I mean, noise of that nature clearly can kill people. It goes up into shockwaves, which of course are the first impact of a huge explosion like that or or a meter meteor hitting or anything like that. Um So there's your pyramid. And the reason it's a pyramid is because more people are involved or affected as you go down the pyramid. So you've got countless millions of people who are suffering irritation and and the effects of not pleasant noise. There's a there's a table in my book, Sound Effects of the most of the noisiest cities in the world. And at the top of that table is Dhaka in Bangladesh, where the average noise level is 119 decibels. Average noise level. Whoa. That's rock concert loud. Average. How people survive in that, I have absolutely no idea. It's terrifying.
Lyssia KatanWow, just honking and car traffic and construction. Where is all this noise coming from?
Julian TreasureYeah, that kind of thing. And there's lots of people who have blown exhausts on scooters, but unfortunately, there's a cultural thing in uh particularly in the subcontinent, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, there's a cultural thing of hooting your horn all the time. And it it is it's cacophony.
Anthropophony And Wildlife Impacts
Julian TreasureUh even, you know, trucks will have a sign on the back saying, horn, please, because you're supposed to be starting to hoot as you come up behind them to tell them that you're there. So there's a culture of horns. And that doesn't help. Engines are noisy. Maybe this'll all get better when we're all driving electric vehicles, if that's what happens. Who knows? But for now, and uh, you know, you mentioned also construction, yes, you've got trains, you've got aircraft, you've got uh all sorts of things going on, you've got air conditioning, mechanical electrical devices all over the place now. It's very hard to get away from. You know, I talk to nature sound recordists like uh the wonderful Bernie Krause, who's an old friend, Chris Watson in the UK. And I just did actually had the honour of curating a whole session at TED at the TED conference in April called Reasons to Listen. And one of the wonderful talks uh was a talk by David George Haskell, who wrote the book Sounds Wild and Broken, beautiful book, with sounds by Matt Mickelson, who runs a fantastic organization called Quiet Parks International. I think it's quietparks.org if you want to find them. It's a it's a global map of the quiet places that you can go and find the quietest places. And you can even recommend your own favorites. And Matt is a brilliant nature sound recordist who records incredible nature sound in spatial format. And they all will say the same thing, which is the effort to record five minutes of nature sound now is enormous. It's almost impossible because there'll be a plane going overhead, or somebody in the distance doing a leaf blow, or you know, a car will go past somewhere. You know, the the impact of our noise is not just on us. As I wrote in in the book, there's a whole chapter on what I call anthropophony, the sound of humanity. We're impacting ourselves with that pyramid. That's all an impact on human beings, but we're also impacting every other species on the planet. If we're deafening whales, for example. I mean, blue whales used to be able to communicate over fifteen hundred, even two thousand kilometers under the sea, using deep layers and bouncing their infrasonic sound very loud, very deep, below what we can hear. And they could communicate over those huge distances. Not anymore, because there are sixty thousand ships plying their courses on the ocean at any one time, cavitating pr propellers, mechanical noise, and we've created a kind of auditory fog in the oceans. So blue whales are now down to about potentially a tenth of that range, which is really serious for them because they're solitary animals. They're very spread out. And this is how they found each other and you know, found a mate, or you know, found a pod or whatever it might be. So that's just one example of the many, many, many ways in which we're damaging the world with our noise.
Lyssia KatanI I've seen it with with birds. I mean, every 4th of July, people, especially in Florida, love their fireworks, and the dogs are terrified, the birds are terrified,
Earplugs, Decibels, And Responsibility
Lyssia Katanthe kids are terrified. Why do we keep doing this? Why are we doing this to ourselves? And and and I find it um I'm really glad that you said ear defenders, because I don't go anywhere without my earplugs. This is not sponsored, but loop earplugs make fantastic earplugs that don't even look like embarrassing, as you said. They look like a piece of jewelry in your ear. And I find more and more how often I'm popping them in because even at restaurants, it is getting so loud. And I'm surprised when I go to music events or festivals or concerts and other people aren't wearing any kind of ear protection. Absolutely. What is that doing? Especially when they're so young. What's going to happen when they're 70, 80 years old?
Julian TreasureYes. Well, I wish I'd uh known about that 40 years ago when I started drumming. No, more than that now. Um, I discovered that um quite late in my drumming career. And so unfortunately I've lost everything above about 11k uh through symbols. You know, when you're hitting a symbol a foot away from your ear or two feet away from your ear, it's uh it's a loud sound. And if you do that enough times, you uh you really damage the high end of your hearing. Um so yes. Anyone who plays, anybody who goes into loud spaces, and just for comfort, you can now get hearing uh you can get um earplugs which are silicon molded by an audiologist. You'll find one above most opticians or related to most opticians, but there's audiologists all over the place. And they'll mold silicon uh earplugs which fit beautifully into your ears, and you can then put into them little attenuating filters which will you can choose. They can take the sound level down by five decibels, ten decibels. I used to have fifteen. And by the way, let me just say something about decibels, because nobody understands decibels. Decibels are a logarithmic scale. So 60 decibels is twice as loud as 50 decibels. Now almost nobody understands that. So when I'm talking about moving from 80 to 90 decibels in a restaurant, for example, that's twice as loud. That's not a trivial thing. You you know, everybody would think 80 to 90, well, it's 10% or something. No, it's twice. And just in the same way, if you go from 70 down to 60, you're halving the noise level. So if you put a 10 decibel filter into your earplugs, you are halving your experience of noise. You can hear everything perfectly, just half as loud. It's really worth doing for anybody who's remotely sensitive to noise. But that's not the right solution long term. You know, I don't want everybody to be walking around with earplugs in. That's not that's not where we want to end up. We want to end up with a in a society where we all take responsibility for the sound that we create, whether we're an organization or an individual, and for the sound that we consume. So, you know, move, block, accept, or as you say, maybe ask, um, make a fuss. If you can, if you can change something, of course it's good to change it. And uh maybe we'll move in the right direction. But sadly, right now it's not a political issue. You don't get any politicians saying, vote for me, I'll make it quieter.
Lyssia KatanAaron Powell Coming back
Savoring For A Better Home Soundscape
Lyssia Katanto the practical sense, because our show very much focuses on practical things that listeners can take into their own lives. If the sound of a home is working against someone, where are they seeing it first? Is it in their sleep? Is it in their mood? And what should they look at or or listen to first?
Julian TreasureAaron Powell Well, I think uh there's a a very simple, deceptively simple, but extremely powerful um exercise that I teach, which will help everybody in this regard. It's called savoring. And it's very simple. You just pick a room, any room. You can do it every room in your house, every room that you occupy regularly, every any space. And even if you can't change the sound, it'll tell you what it's doing to you. And the first thing you do is you close your eyes, so you restrict the visual input, and you consciously listen. And then you're asking yourself three questions, only three, and it's very easy to remember because they all begin with H if the way you remember them. Is this sound healthy? Is it good for me? The second question, is it helpful? Is it actually helping me to do what I want to do in this space? And the third question, is it making me happy? Do I like it? So if you get a no to any of those three questions, that's the sign that you need to do something about it. You need to move yourself, you need to change the sound, you need to make a request, or you need to find a way of blocking it if you can't do anything else in that space. So, I mean, talking about a house, yes, your bedroom's extremely important because of what I talked about earlier, and the the effect of noise on sleep and the the importance of sleep in health and happiness of a human being. It's generally accepted that you should have a quiet bedroom. 40 decibels is very quiet, even 35 decibels, which is very, very quiet. Without hums, buzzes, distractions, loud noise coming in from the outside, uh, or ideally a snoring partner, of course, and that's a problem which you know is harder to solve, but there are solutions out there. Um, if you have a noise in your bedroom, maybe you can do something about it. I have to admit I'm the person in American hotels who unplugs the fridge in the bedroom, even if I just grabble around behind a huge furniture unit, because the fridge typically will be going z all night. The air conditioning, if I can, I'll turn it down to minimum because you may not notice it, but it's having an effect on you all the time. And obviously you want the room to be cool, that's the other thing we know about sleeping. It should be of cool uh temperature, not a hot room. Um, and that's got to be maintained somehow. And in many hotels you can't even open a window. But if you can do those things without too much noise, that's where to aim. So just listen to any of any of the electricomechanical issues. If you have a problem with noise coming in from the outside, then perhaps you can help yourself by double glazing the window or uh heavy curtains on the inside of the window, noise really noise-reducing curtains, and that's just about the the the the the depth of the fabric or the density of the fabric. Um there are things you can do, maybe a blind, you can get acoustic blinds you could pull down which will blank out much of the noise. It's worth it because sleep is sacred. Then you can look at other rooms, you know, there'll there'll be equipment in some other rooms, kitchens, for example, are full of equipment. But do try and make sure that even if you've got a dishwasher, a washing machine, a tumble dryer, that you have you buy things, or next time you buy them, you look at the noise output and buy the quietest ones you can find. Because it all adds up. And if you're in a you know a utility space with several of those devices going at once, it can get really noisy, especially since those spaces tend to be hard surfaces everywhere. Because they're wet rooms, you know. We don't want carpets to get wet, we don't want fancy wallpaper and curtains, uh, you know, the kind of soft furnishings to get wet. So be careful. You may be able to put in soundproofing or sound acoustic treatments on the ceiling, for example, out of the way. Um so think about all of these things. Removing noise is a big part of this. Acoustic treatments can really help as well. And it's gonna vary from room to room, from house to house, and from person to person, because you know, what makes me happy won't necessarily be what makes you happy. You know, there might be people in the world who can't stand the sound of birds coming in from the outside. I did once meet one person who said they hated bird song. I don't think I've ever met another one, but you know, it's possible. Uh so you know it it it it comes down to what is gonna make you personally happy, healthy, and productive in that space.
Lyssia KatanAnd uh I think uh to add to that, just becoming aware of it. I know I wasn't aware of the sounds in in my space until I had a podcast. And suddenly every construction noise, every sound is impacting a recording. But I I can't say that before that I ever even thought about it. And and I think that's the case for a majority of people. They just it just something in the background, like you said, until the air conditioning turns off, we don't realize that it was even on.
Julian TreasureWell, that's where savoring is so important. When you close your eyes and you consciously listen, then you've changed your relationship enormously with the space that you're occupying. And you are suddenly actually engaging with the sound around you in a much more intensive way. And it will reveal all sorts of things that you haven't been aware of until now.
Lyssia KatanAaron Powell If someone listening was to take only one thing from this episode, what would you want it to be?
Julian TreasureWell, I think actually it would be pretty much what we've just talked about, savoring the sound around you. You know, you're very careful about what you put in your mouth, and if it doesn't taste good, you spit it out. So we are, you know, we're we're much more sensitive about taste than we are about sound. You know, you have no ear lids. Sound is a very intimate sense because sound waves go inside your head, they touch you inside your head. Uh, but it's a passive sense. You know, it's very much more uh I can never remember which way round it is. Yin, I think, isn't it? The um the passive, the dark, the female, the as opposed to the sort of more active, outgoing energy of yang. I think that's the way round it is. Um that perhaps is why it's an undervalued sense in this modern world, which is all about being competitive and out there and expressed and you know, all the rest of the stuff that we not to mention overstimulated, dopamine addicted, and all the rest of the terrible stuff that goes with modern life. So I think reconnecting with this primal sense in a quiet way, sitting in a room, closing your eyes, and consciously listening, that's a very important access to really the understanding that listening is a skill, listening takes work, and that if you start to consciously listen to the world around you, the spaces you occupy, and of course to the people around you, life can change dramatically for the better.
Lyssia KatanAaron Powell Julian, it has been such an honor having you on the podcast. Like
Resources And App Links
Lyssia KatanI mentioned before, I'm a huge fan. I love your TED Talks, I and your books and everything you're doing. Where can someone follow your work?
Julian TreasureWell, the books are out there, sound business for anybody running a business, How to Be Heard, which is about communication skills and sound effects, which for anybody's interested in sound, uh the sound of the world, the sound of us, uh, the sound around you, and what how sound works, that's what that book's about. Um I have a website, obviously, which is actually just about to be quite dramatically overhauled. Um I have a I'll give you links, actually, Elycia, to a couple of things. First of all, I have an app coming out for anybody who wants to speak or listen more consciously. Uh the app is about conscious listening, powerful speaking, and even masterful presenting skills. So that's about to come out September the 1st, uh, which will be in the past, I imagine, as people see this. Um then uh also I have a communication skills assessment, which might be quite interesting for people to do. It's got a listening assessment in it that you can do for yourself or for an organization, uh, as well as a speaking assessment. So there's four bits to it, but you can do any one or any or all of them if you want. It's free. And I'll give you a link to that because people might enjoy doing that. So I would definitely point people to the app, which I'm very, very proud of. It's been months of work, and I can't wait to have it out there. Um, and the the the the listings, the communication skills assessment, which is, I think, really interesting.
Lyssia KatanAmazing. We will link them all in the show notes. Julian, thank you so much for everything you're doing. It is an absolute pleasure getting to speak with you and listen to you. And and I'm so grateful for everything you're doing for the world. And hopefully we learn to listen a little bit better.
Julian TreasureWell, thanks for the opportunity, Lizzie. I really appreciate it. It's been lovely talking to you. Thank you.
Lyssia KatanThank you so much for spending this time with me on Room to Think. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to follow the show, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who you think would really appreciate a more thoughtful approach to their space. You can find more Design Meets Psychology insights on social, in our community, and definitely in upcoming episodes so you can build a better life by design. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.