Julian Treasure on the 4 ways sound effects us

I was recently viewing speeches on TED.com came across a great one by Julian Treasure on the four ways sound effects us. For those of you who don’t know about TED, it is a website devoted to displaying speeches from a very diverse group of professionals about very interesting subjects. These subjects range from inspiring messages of life, to more exact explanations of scientific studies among many disciplines. Mr. Treasure has obviously studied sound and its effects on the human life. He had a very calm approach about the information he was giving to his audience. This mirrored the message behind his speech perfectly. He wanted to make his audience aware of how impactful sound was on not only their personal life, but also on their employees, brands, and businesses. Most sound around us is accidental and unpleasant and this makes our relationship with sound mostly unconscious. Julian played lots of audio clips as he was talking to help make his point apparent. You could hear the audience laughing and really understanding his message because they were actually experiencing the effects mentioned by Julian. There are four effects sound has on the human being, and knowing how to shape these sounds can dramatically change the outcome of situations. One effect is physiological, like when you hear an alarm or a buzzer. These sounds and the harmonics series and overtones that make them will actually produce cortizol, the “Fight or Flight” hormone. These sounds will also increase heart rate, breathing, and brainwaves. Knowing that approximately 12 cycles per minute resembles the breathing of a sleeping human further these sounds are very calming to us. Another effect of sound is psychological. Good and bad sounds have a profound effect on our mood and attitudes. The next effect is cognitive, like when two people are talking and your brain must choose which conversation to focus on. To the sound engineers in the audience, this is better known as the “Cocktail Party Effect” and it is due to the very limited bandwidth our auditory sensory system functions on. I found it very interesting that in an open plan office space, this phenomenon actually reduces productivity by 66%. Having a separated, quiet environment to work in will improve productivity by one third. The last effect was behavioral, and in my opinion the most noticeable effect. It was very interesting to hear Mr. Treasure say that most retail music is very inappropriate and in this way they reduce sales by 28%. He mentioned and I strongly agree that music is the most powerful sound in existence. The reason for this is music is easy to recognize, and it is easy to associate with. The summation of these will produce power. As a musician and a sound engineer this makes me feel an unimaginable sense of power of my fellow humans way of life. It also employees a greater sense of responsibility wielding said power. In a room filled with very intelligent and powerful businessmen and women, giving an informative speech is an almost impossible task, but Mr. Treasure’s calm domineer and solid statistics definitely impressed the audience. He left them with the four golden rules for commercial sound; make it congruent, make it appropriate, make it valuable, and finally to test it and re-test it again. Julian has devoted himself to the study of sound and its effects and he had spent some time with public speaking as well. I have a deeper understanding and appreciation for sound and I know I will be more aware of its effects on myself and those who I decide to market my wares to in the future. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did and more importantly I hope you learned something about the sound that surround you every day. Until next time . . .
Here is a link to the actual speech on TED.com
http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html