SOUND EXPERIENCE CENTRE

THE 4 WAYS SOUND AFFECTS US

My new book, how to be Heard, is all about communicating, and it’s also
about sound.
Sound has four very powerful effects. The sound of your voice will do
this just as much as anything else. In fact, probably more than anything
else. I’m fond of saying that the human voice is one of the most
powerful sounds on the planet. It’s the only sound that can say I
love you or even start a war.

PHYSIOLOGICALLY
 The first is physiologically. Sound affects our bodies. Your body is
70% water. Sound travels well in water, so we’re very good
conductors of sound.
 Hearing is our primary warning sense.
 There are plenty of vertebrates who don’t see very well at all or
not at all, but the hearing is a universal sense, as Seth Horowitz
calls it.
 Now, sound affects us physiologically in very powerful ways.
Because hearing is your primary warning sense, a sudden sound
will start a process.

 It releases cortisol, it increases your heart rate, it changes your

breathing.
 This is because we’ve been programmed over hundreds of
thousands of years to assume that any sudden or unexplained
sound is a threat and your body gets ready to fight or flee.

PSYCHOLOGICALLY
 The second way sound affects us is psychologically. It changes our
emotions and our moods. Music will do that, of course. I’m sure
you can think of a song that will make you happy.
 So, music changes our mood. However, it’s not the only sound that
does that. There are plenty of sounds in nature that do.

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 Bird song for example makes us feel relaxed and reassured,

because we’ve learned over hundreds of thousands of years again
that when the birds are singing, we’re normally pretty safe.
 Sound can affect our emotional state quite deeply.

COGNITIVELY
 Thirdly sound affects us cognitively.
 How well you work is very dependent on the sound around you.
 In children the loud music probably takes up critical audio
bandwidth and they’re not able to hear that internal voice so well.
They may do their homework for longer so you may get a better
result, but they’re not doing more work per minute.
 The most distracting sound of all is the human voice. If
somebody’s speaking next to you, it’s very difficult to block out
that sound. We have no earlids and distracting human
conversation hugely impedes your productivity.

BEHAVIOURALLY
 The final way sound affects us is behaviourally.
 We will tend to move away from unpleasant sound if we can and
even gravitate towards pleasant sounds.
 Sound can cause stress us and make us behave negatively.
 It makes us less sociable, less helpful and less approachable if
we’re in a noisy setting.
 So sound changes us in four powerful ways and those four ways
are running all the time.
 It’s important to know this because if we start to listen consciously
to the sound around us, we could start to design the environment
so that those effects are not working against us.

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