Julian Treasure Quotes

People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years, they have learnt when the birds sing, they are safe; it's when birds stop singing that people need to worry.

- Julian Treasure

We have the capacity for about 1.6 human conversations, so if you're listening to one conversation particularly, you're only left with 0.6 for your inner voice that helps you write.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

You or I never buy an Intel product explicitly, and yet their sonic logo is far better known and more powerful than its visual equivalent. It's probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Julian Treasure

It's an interesting door opening, this use of sonic signalling - using sound to alert us in a more subtle way than a beep.

- Julian Treasure

We move through soundscapes all the time, and most of them are accidental - a by-product. Most retail soundscapes are accidental, incongruent with the brands, and mostly hostile.

- Julian Treasure

While interrupting is not always wrong, it should never become a habit.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.

- Julian Treasure

My dream is to make the world sound better, but the only way to do that is to let businesses see that there is profit in it.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Noise is the number one problem in modern offices. A big part of addressing this issue is making sure unwanted sound from adjacent spaces doesn't intrude or interfere.

- Julian Treasure

It's dangerous to generalise about sound because many of its effects work through association. These can be universal: we all instinctively associate any sudden, unexpected noise with danger and react with a release of fight/flight hormones, while most people find sounds like gentle rainfall or birdsong calming and reassuring.

- Julian Treasure

Sadly, piped music in so many public spaces is often just more noise. Rarely is it carefully designed to enhance our experience; much more likely it is there because retailers have subscribed to an incorrect view that music makes people spend more.

- Julian Treasure

Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively, and behaviorally all the time. The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.

- Julian Treasure

By starting to pay attention to our natural soundscapes, businesses can reduce staff turnover, increase productivity, and increase profits.

- Julian Treasure

There's a little bit of protocol in the real world which is quite important. If you speak to me, we understand that we've entered into a social contract. But sound that you haven't given permission to receive is noise, and generally unwelcome.

- Julian Treasure

Without our natural soundscape, we are making ourselves tired, stressed, and frightened all at the same time.

- Julian Treasure

The need to be right can arise from a fear of being disrespected. Or it may come out of the fear of being seen as we really are: as flawed human beings who are perfectly imperfect and full of contradictions and confusions.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

In the U.K., architects train for five years, and they spend one day on sound.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

You can detect a hostile listening or a bored listening or a tired listening or an excited and engaged listening.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Music is designed to be listened to, so it's calling for attention all the time, syphoning off our very limited auditory bandwidth and elbowing aside our ability to listen to the voice in our head we need when we're doing mental work.

- Julian Treasure

Men tend to listen in what I call a reductive way, which is to say for a point, for a solution. You know, we like to have a problem and solve it. Bang. Thank you very much. On to the next thing.

- Julian Treasure

A great deal of our work involves switching music off.

- Julian Treasure

We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority.

- Julian Treasure

If you put music on top of noise, it's like putting icing on top of mud; it might look like a cake, but it doesn't taste like one.

- Julian Treasure

I have visited a number of boutique hotels where you feel there is a little bit of self-indulgence going on.

- Julian Treasure

Most of us walk around with our ears switched off because so much noise is unpleasant.

- Julian Treasure

I've heard many reports of police attending scenes of domestic violence where they've had to turn off music and televisions and radios. Noise tends to drive us a bit crazy.

- Julian Treasure

In a room full of 60 to 70 people which is open plan and absolutely quiet, it's very intimidating to make a phone call. And if you do so, you're upsetting about 15 to 20 people because they're put off by your phone call.

- Julian Treasure

It's a common mistake to speak the same to everybody. We all have different filters.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

We're designing environments that make us crazy. And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.

- Julian Treasure

There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care.

- Julian Treasure

Some of my best friends are architects. And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings.

- Julian Treasure

It's time architects start designing for our ears as well as our eyes.

- Julian Treasure

If you're surrounded by noise all the time, it has a pretty bad effect on the spirit.

- Julian Treasure

The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time.

- Julian Treasure

There's a lot of research now showing that noise, and the lack of quiet working space, is one of the biggest issues for all office workers.

- Julian Treasure

People often mistake our mission at The Sound Agency for a crusade for silence, but actually, silence is in many ways just as bad as too much noise.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Someone else's paper is fascinating until you buy it yourself. Then it loses its appeal, and you have to pass it on to someone else to reinvigorate it.

- Julian Treasure

We all like to look good. However, this basic human desire can often get in the way of our listening and our speaking. This tendency often evinces itself in two simple words: 'I know.' But if I know everything, what can I learn? Absolutely nothing.

- Julian Treasure

Conscious listening is very largely overlooked in the mainstream of education. It's such an important skill in life. And yet we expect children to pick it up from home or from peers informally.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Music is the most powerful sound there is, often inappropriately deployed. It's powerful for two reasons: you recognize it fast, and you associate it very powerfully.

- Julian Treasure

Unlike so many other sounds, there's no maximum exposure to birdsong.

- Julian Treasure

The desire to be right can be very destructive in relationships.

- Julian Treasure

Your ears are always on - you have no ear lids. They work even when you sleep.

- Julian Treasure

If you're listening consciously, you can take control of the sound around you. It's good for your health and for your productivity. If we all do that, we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living in the world.

- Julian Treasure

Sound in a space affects us profoundly. It changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretion, brain waves. It affects our emotions and our cognition.

- Julian Treasure

I love reading other people's papers on the Tube.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Most people think it's a linear relationship: I speak, you listen. Actually, it's a circle, because the way you listen affects how I speak, and the way I speak affects the way you listen.

- Julian Treasure

Music is made to be listened to, so you immediately have an issue where you're playing it in the background like wallpaper. Music doesn't want to behave like that.

- Julian Treasure

I often go into shops and ask them to turn the music down.

- Julian Treasure

This devaluing of listening is handed down from generation to generation. There are many children who don't have the experience of being listened to by their parents.

- Julian Treasure

It would be some sort of shock horror story if a child left school unable to read or write. But we do not teach explicitly, or test in the main, either speaking or - much more importantly - listening.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

If you want to be listened to, the first step is to listen well yourself.

- Julian Treasure

I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, 'My goodness, you look ugly this morning.' Perhaps that's not necessary.

- Julian Treasure

If we teach our children how to listen properly to the world - and especially to each other - they will understand the consequences of their own sound and be far more responsible in making it.

- Julian Treasure

I think it's pretty pointless, my children learning to use a keyboard - we will just talk to our computers. Why would we not?

- Julian Treasure

If we're not listened to, then that doesn't create a desire inside us to listen to others. Societally, we don't value it.

- Julian Treasure

When you hear a child's voice, it will have that immediate effect of putting you in mind of looking after children.

- Julian Treasure

All of our physical rhythms are being affected by sound outside us all the time.

- Julian Treasure

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.

- Julian Treasure

Sound changes moods, yet most of the sound around us is unplanned.

- Julian Treasure

We experience every space in five senses, so it's strange that architects design just for the eyes.

- Julian Treasure

I'm totally obsessed with sound. It's my life.

- Julian Treasure

Not even a woman cannot understand two people talking at the same time.

- Julian Treasure

Retailers don't think about why they have music. There are a number of issues. It can be very powerful in the right place, where it is played appropriately.

- Julian Treasure

You can't truly listen to someone and do anything else at the same time.

- Julian Treasure

As parents, we tend to be in Tell rather than Listen mode.

- Julian Treasure