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.
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.
Sound in a space affects us profoundly. It changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretion, brain waves. It affects our emotions and our cognition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While interrupting is not always wrong, it should never become a habit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
