How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet - Julian Treasure

Sound Affects - How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet

Julian Treasure's TED Talk How to Speak So That People Want to Listen is the 6th most viewed TED talk of all time. In his new book Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet, Julian takes us on an epic journey to rediscover the wonder of sound and to help enhance our own happiness, effectiveness and well-being.

by JULIAN TREASURE  | 2025

Homo sapiens has been around for perhaps 300,000 years, and our ancestors for anything up to three million years before that. For the vast majority of that time, our relationship with sound has been first and foremost a matter of survival. Early humans used sound to hunt and detect danger: our hearing functions just as well in night as in day, and we can hear what’s behind us, so it’s our primary warning sense – which may be why we process sound around 20 times faster than vision.

For almost the entirety of our existence, sound has been our most essential connection with the world. All human knowledge was passed aurally; with no recording, attention was critical because if you missed it, you lost it. Some 5,000 years ago, writing developed and then spread, though it was the preserve of the elite until reading and writing became widespread around the time of the Industrial Revolution, just two hundred years ago.

Today, we teach reading and writing in school, but not speaking or listening. With the development of email, personal devices, SMS and instant messaging, and most of all social media, our eyes and fingers are held hostage by visual communication to the point that many young people feel uncomfortable with conversation, whether face to face or on a phone.

We have switched off our ears in an overwhelmingly ocular world. Architects design for the eyes, so many of the spaces we work, learn, heal and live in are damaging our happiness, effectiveness and well-being.

As the global population grows and over half of humanity live in cities, the world gets noisier every year, with devastating effects on human society and health, and on the animals we share the planet with.

The noise of more than a billion cars, trucks and buses and millions of jet aircraft flights escalates every year, with well documented effects on health and quality of life:

Our response to the noise is to shout louder and close our ears still further. The Internet is full of echo chambers driving groups of people to increasingly extreme views and polarising our societies. Blame, judgmentalism and anger are endemic as people are seduced by the dopamine hit of feeling righteous, which so often requires making someone else wrong – even if that involves lies or distortions. The loss of listening creates conflict at all levels, and is antithetical to the whole principle of democracy, which relies on tolerance of diverse viewpoints and acceptance of the will of the majority.

It’s not society that’s suffering the consequences. If you put a lot of people who don’t listen well into an organisation, the result is predictable: research shows that organisations put at least four times the resources into outbound communication as they do into listening, whether that’s to their own people or to customers. Teamwork, leadership and business relationships suffer if people don’t listen well.

And of course our personal relationships are founded in listening, which is why the most common complaint is: ‘You never listen to me!’

Other species are suffering too. Whales that once could communicate across entire oceans now live in an auditory fog generated by the engine noise of 60,000 ships in motion at any one time. 

We are on a slippery slope, where quietness is a vanishing experience: there are very few places on Earth that are not overflown by aircraft, and the auditory environment our ancestors took for granted – just the age-old sounds of wind, water and birds – is increasingly rare and even completely absent from the lives of most of humanity. The noisiest cities on Earth are literally deafening, while millions of young people unknowingly damage their precious hearing with excessively loud music delivered deep into their ears from headphones. One in four humans have hearing damage, which as it progresses can lead to disconnection, isolation and depression.

We urgently need to rediscover our listening in order to reconnect with one another and with the planet and those we share it with. We can all start by rediscovering and embracing silence, wherever we can find it, even if for just a few minutes a day. Then  we can become conscious that listening is a skill, not a capability like hearing – a skill we can practice and master, with huge benefits for our relationships, our effectiveness and our health. A global rebirth of listening is the essential requirement to save our civilization from escalating conflict and fragmentation. It’s not too late, but there is no time to lose.

Listen.

Julian's new Book, Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet
is released on 27th March 2025 and available to buy on Amazon.

Every day, the sounds around us affect every aspect of our human experience, and thus fundamentally alter our quality of life, for better or worse. It is only recently that scientists have realised that sounds connect us to the world in ways that are every bit as vivid and evocative as visual landscapes. Hearing is the first sense we develop, and as our primary warning sense it is hardwired into our brains. And yet, in an increasingly noisy and distracted world, most people pay scant attention to the sounds around them, causing them to lose contact with the essential skill of listening.

Sound Affects is about rediscovering the wonder of sound, and understanding how powerfully it affects us, whether we are paying attention or not. It is also a manual for taking back responsibility for the sounds we consume and the sounds we make, so we can enhance our own happiness, effectiveness and well-being.

About Julian:

Julian Treasure is a sought-after and top-rated international speaker. Collectively his five TED talks on various aspects of sound and communication have been viewed more than 50 million times. His talk How To Speak So That People Want To Listen is in the rare group that has over 20 million views on TED.com alone, placing it in the top 10 TED talks of all time.

Julian's first book, Sound Business, is the seminal work on creating intentional, effective business sound, now in its second edition and also published in Japanese.

His second book, How To Be Heard, is a practical guide to improving the vital personal communication skills of speaking and listening. The book includes many simple exercises; interviews with experts; and potent, transformational concepts gleaned from 30 years' experience as a speaker with a passion for listening.

Julian has been widely featured as a sound and communication expert in the world's media, including TIME Magazine; The Economist; The Times; and many international TV and radio stations and podcasts. Julian is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a long time musician, remembering with affection his two 1981 BBC John Peel sessions (the bands were Transmitters and Missing Presumed Dead). He lives in Orkney, Scotland with Jane and their daughter Holly.