Instant Genius - The listening hacks that can transform your health

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Our everyday lives are filled with sounds of all kinds – birdsong, traffic noise, the music we choose to listen to or is played in shops and restaurants, the list is practically endless. But what impact are these sounds having on our individual health and wellbeing and the world at large? In this episode, we speak to author and founder of The Listening Society Julian Treasure about his latest book Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet. He tells us how hearing is the first sense we develop, how ambient sounds impact our health and wellbeing, and how listening more closely to what’s going on around us, rather than simply hearing, can enhance almost every aspect of our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear a world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, BBC Science Focus. Our everyday lives are filled with sounds of all kinds. Bird song, traffic noise, the music we choose to listen to, or is played in shops and restaurants. The list is practically endless.

But what impact are these sounds having on our individual health and well-being and the world at large? In this episode, we speak to author and founder of the Listening Society, Judy and Treasure, about his latest book, Sound Effects, how sound shapes our lives, our well-being and our planet. He tells us how hearing is the first sense we develop, how ambient sounds impact our health and well-being, and how listening more closely to what's going on around us, rather than simply hearing, can enhance almost every aspect of our lives. So, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks very much for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. Delightful to be here. So today we're talking about your book, Sound Effects, how sound shapes our lives, our well-being, and our planet. So first off, that's covering a lot of ground.

What's the kind of overall premise of the book? The book came out of my realization, really, of 20 years of working with sound, that people really aren't listening. And in fact, our listening is degrading. And since I've been able to do a lot of research around this, and all the numbers show that is true. Listening is degrading, which is very important and very sad on a lot of levels. So I guess the book is, I would say, a plea to listen in a world that's forgotten how,

or forgetting how. And as well as talking about the magic of sound, the wonder of sound, which is a lot of the book, which is a great reason to listen actually, just opening that door into a conscious appreciation of the world of sound. This is a whole new dimension in your existence and your consciousness. The book also talks about the power of sound and the way it affects us, which most people are completely unconscious about. I guess the word consciousness I've used several times, and I think the more I think about this book, the more it is. really about enhancing one's consciousness, living a fuller life, happier, healthier life, and a life that's more connected to everything else around us as well. So you mentioned there your background.

Can you give us a quick summary of that, please? Yes, well, I've been a musician since I was very young. Actually, I was very lucky to have a fairly enlightened mother who was playing me, well, Carnival of the Animals and Peter and the Wolf and those kind of records, which really engaged me in listening to music in a conscious and very attentive way from a very young age. I mean, probably six, I should think. So I kind of almost inevitably became a musician, and I think I've always been very, very auditory. So when playing music, I think that does develop a different kind of listening,

because if you're in a band or an orchestra, you have to listen to all of the other instruments at the same time. So it's a multi-track listening. and you're doing something complicated, whether you're playing a violin or in my case drums, it's a complicated physical thing to be coordinating as well. And it may well be that you're reading music, which is a very complex code in itself. So you're doing all those things at the same time. It's not surprising that the research shows that musicians have bigger brains than non-musicians, which I talk about in the book.

It's the corpus callosum that gets expanded. the link between your two hemispheres, the rational and the intuitive, which is not surprising again, I think. So for me, that kind of listening was embedded in me very deep, very early. And I had a long career in marketing, producing lovely magazines for people. And then when I sold that, I started the company called the Sound Agency, which was an audio branding company, asking and answering the question, how does your brand sound, which many businesses still never think about, I'm afraid. And I had an epiphany along the way, really. The epiphany was, I was looking at all these businesses thinking, they're making all this noise.

Do they not realize this terrible noise in shops, in showrooms, in offices? It's really damaging people and their business. And then I realized, well, hang on, the reason they're making all this noise is because they're full of people who don't listen. And that has been the genesis of the book. I had written books before about sound. There's a book called Sound Business. There's a book about speaking. listening called How to Be Heard, but this book really came out of that profound realization

that our listening is dying. So let's go right to the basics then. So in the book, you talk about hearing being the first sense that humans develop. So that's really interesting. So can you talk about that? And what actually happens when we hear a sound? Yes, well, sound is, I think the simplest definition is audible. vibration. And that limits it very much. We can sense vibrations with our ears and our bodies, incidentally, between about 20 hertz, 20 cycles a second, and 20 kilohertz. It's 20,000 cycles a second. That's a very limited range of vibration, actually. There are animals that can hear much lower than we can, whales, elephants, and there are animals on this planet that can hear

far higher than we can, two or three octaves above us, dolphins and even a moth can hear very, very high sounds. So we are only hearing a little part of the spectrum, really. It is the first sense to develop. In the womb, just 12 weeks after conception, you have no ears, you have no eyes, but you are sensing vibration with every cell in your body. What is it you're sensing? Labdub pause. Labdub pause. The mother's heartbeat is the first sound that we experience. It's very powerful. It's very loud in there. And it's a three-beat incidentally, which is maybe why we love Waltz music so much, and Waltz music is so happy. So we have that in this kind of dull, there's no high frequencies in the womb. We're in liquid.

It's very muffled. You can hear people's voices, and we now know that babies actually pick up language and voices and tonality and so forth. in the womb, it's not true, incidentally, that if you play Mozart to an unborn baby, it's going to be smarter. That is definitely not the case. Although Baroque music is very lovely and may be helpful to many people when they're working. I always think, actually, interestingly, that one of the most shocking things about birth must be the auditory experience. Because you move from this lovely muffled environment with the comforting heartbeat, suddenly you're out into a world where there are hisses, beeps and the whole treble end of the auditory spectrum hits you,

probably like a brick, I should think. Suddenly all these top-end sounds come at you and all these unfamiliar sounds, and you've lost the heartbeat. That must be a big part of why newborn's cry, I would think. So you mentioned there that your background as a musician. So we can't really talk about sounds without talking about music. I'm also a musician. I played classical guitar for, I don't know.

30 years. But something that's really interesting I find is that our ability to distinguish, as you mentioned, between different instruments based on their timbre and their pitch and things like that. What do we know about that? Well, yes, timbre is incredibly important. The quality of a sound, the harmonics, particularly of a sound, are how we distinguish our grandmother's voice from a friend's voice or a flute from an oboe playing exactly the same note. So we, we are able to distinguish those things very, very beautifully and finally and instantly with our amazing brain, which decodes sound. Now we know in a pretty holographic way, there's not one center in the brain that decodes

sound. It's going everywhere, particularly to the limbic system first, because hearing is our primary warning sense. I can't, I don't know about you, but I can't see what's behind me, and I can't see in the dark. And we spend a lot of time in the dark, you know, half our lives pretty much. So hearing is very important, as it is every other species. You know, there's no vertebrate on this planet that doesn't have ears or some sense of hearing.

Plenty that don't have eyes. So hearing is our primary warning sense and we decode sound far faster than we decode vision, 20 times faster at the high end, which is because that's how we detect danger. You know, if you hear a sound behind you and it's unknown, you will spin. round and you'll have a fight-flight reflex immediately. So, you know, hearing is very, very powerful. Sound goes right inside our ears. It touches us inside our head. So it's a very visceral sense. And this tiny little membrane, the size of your little fingernail, the eardrum, decodes everything from a Beethoven symphony to an explosion. It's an extraordinary, simple and magical process,

I think, hearing. But of course, hearing, we need to distinguish from listening. Hearing is a capability. Listening is a skill. And most people do not have that differentiation. So let's unpack that, then. That was actually going to be my next question. What is the sort of key difference between those two things? Well, I talk in the book, there's a chapter about how hearing works and how sound affects us in that way. And it's miraculous. So I think it's worth understanding. And certainly worth teaching our children about protecting their hearing because there are, according to the World Health Organization, a billion children on this planet who are losing their hearing through headphone abuse, which is very concerning. So we need to understand hearing better, but listening is different. Listening is not a physical or electrical process, which is what hearing is, physical, chemical, electrical.

It eventually results in neurons firing in our brain. Listening is a mental process. It's where we select certain things to pay attention to out of everything we hear and then we make them mean something. So I have a definition in the book of listening, which is making meaning from sound. And it's mental, not physical. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast.

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network usage. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners, just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking.

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has very big psychological effects on it. And you kind of take it for granted. But when you stop and think about it, it's very unusual. You know, what can we say about that? I've heard people say that instruments generally came about to replicate the sound of the human voice and things like that. Well, we don't know the origins of music because they're lost in the pre-writing prehistoric era going back tens of thousands of years. I imagine the human voice was the first thing.

And if you believe Stephen Meython with his book, The Singing Neanderthals, maybe it came out of motheries, mother humming. Maybe we had a proto language before we invented words, which was purely tonal. It's quite possible and quite realistic. But as he, I think, or maybe other people have said, you know, if you imagine a human history, 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, without music, it would have been awfully quiet, really. You know, banging on things, blowing things, hitting things, shouting, singing. These things have been around for as long as people have been people in groups, you know, around a campfire to celebrate things, rights of passage and so forth. There's no human tribe that's ever been discovered on this planet that hasn't had music. So to be human, it is to be musical.

But the other way around is not true, of course, because there are other species which are musical, not just us. Yeah, so what can we say about that then? Do you think that, like, the animal kingdom, of course, if anyone's aware of people like Messian and whatever, was interested in birdsong and things? So what can we say about the relationship between our surrounding environment and the animal? and our own use and production of sound. Well, that's kind of two chapters of the book. One is called Biophony, which is all about the sound of other living things on this planet.

And yes, I talk about in their birds and humpback whales and other species that we know. Well, we say they make songs. We say they make music. I mean, that's our interpretation. It's a little bit anthropomorphic, perhaps. But I interviewed David Rothenberg in the book. who's somebody I know quite well, Professor David Rothenberg, who was also a jazz musician and plays his clarinet with all sorts of animals, mainly with nightingales. And his view is,

in his book, Why Birds Sing, that animals do have anesthetic sensibility. They do it because they love it. Yes, of course, you know, there's mating and there's food finding and territory defense and whatever else it might be, but they don't have to do it that so beautifully. There are plenty of birds that don't make beautiful sound. And, you know, there's one whale, one humpback whale was recorded singing for 23 hours. I don't think that's just functional. So yes, I mean, that joy of making beautiful sound, I think, is something that is not just human. And the chapter on anthropophony, the sound of us, has got some pretty depressing things in it about the way we're committing some form of ecocide, generally by being so noisy. I mean, for example, Blue Whales used to be able to communicate

over more than 1,000 kilometres, maybe right across oceans with their very, very low frequency sound below what we can hear. And it's a spine-tangling sound if you listen to it on headphones and even the bit we can hear, which you can do in the book instantly because all the sounds are keyed to a website where you can go and listen to the sounds as you're reading the book. Now, with 60,000 ships moving around the oceans at any one time, blue whales are restricted to one-tenth of their former range, which is a problem for them because they're very solitary animals, and this was how they found each other and communicated and probably found mates. So that kind of noise is interrupting all the basic processes of animals.

The US has lost a third of its birds in the last 30 years or so, a third. and that's through habitat destruction, insecticides, which are killing the things they eat. You know, we are having a devastating effect on the world's sound. And I do think it's quite sad to think that our children, and definitely grandchildren, will probably never experience the dawn chorus of birds because we're wiping them out. So that brings up the sort of wider idea of pollution. So a lot of people will be aware of air pollution and things like this. But what you're talking about there is something called noise.

pollution, chiefly human-generated noise pollution. You know, so how big an impact is that having? You just made some points there, but what can we do about it? Well, we are having a devastating effect, as I just said, on other species, but it's not just on other species, it's on us as well. And unfortunately, most people have become a bit numb to the effects of noise. Over half of humanity now live in cities, and cities are still. getting noisier every year, unfortunately. So this kind of constant noise causes people to suppress their consciousness of sound even more. It's just not very nice the sound around you most of

the time. So you see people on tubes or walking around or working in offices wearing headphones the whole time, replacing the noise outside with something that they choose, which incidentally may not help you to work better because music is quite distracting. It's designed to be listened to. However, it's, I understand, a much more pleasant distraction than somebody else's conversation, which is very irritating and can reduce people's productivity by up to two-thirds in open plan offices. So, yes, the noise we're making is devastating. It's only just behind air pollution.

And according to the European community or union or whatever it's called these days, there are a million years of healthy life lost every year in Europe to traffic noise alone. And you can see the way that plays out, you know, loud traffic noise, which is disturbing the sleep of millions of people. It's way above the World Health Organization recommended levels at night. But if your sleep is being constantly disturbed, that's really bad for your health. It makes you stressed, angry, and ultimately unhealthy. We have strong, strong correlations between noise levels and increased risk of heart attack, all sorts of other diseases. And that's not big noise.

you, and I'm not talking about deafening noise. There's a German study that found that the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels. You or I would have to raise our voice quite strongly to be over that, which is why many teachers are losing their voices, and there's been legal action from quite a few about that. And I think most teachers working in that environment are shortening their lives by working in that noise because we know that 65 decibels is the threshold. above which chronic noise exposure increases your risk of heart attack.

So how about an extreme example of that then? So some people are so bothered by sound that it really severely psychologically affects them. Like it's known as mesophonia. So what can you tell us about that? Yeah, there are two conditions. Well, quite similar. Hyperacusus is extreme sensitivity to noise, which I'm starting to suffer from. I have to say, I mean, I went to a restaurant. I was speaking at a conference in Newcastle yesterday,

and I went to the pre-conference dinner. I had to leave. The restaurant, like many are, was all hard surfaces, and there were about 150 people. And the Lombard effect kicked in, which is where I speak louder, and then you speak louder, and then you speak even louder. It's a spiral upwards. And I would think it was 110 decibels. I mean, I'm sorry, I can't hear what anybody's saying that anymore because of the cocktail effect. I am, you know, 67 now. But also I think the hyperacusis is kicking in. I was very, very uncomfortable. I had to leave. Misophonia is slightly different. It's a physiological or psychological, perhaps, response to particular sounds. So it may be that the sound of somebody chewing, for example, causes a violent reaction in you. Many people feel sick when that

happens. And there are other forms of that as well. So yeah, there are a lot of people who are very sensitive to sound, and particularly in the neurodiverse community, we know that noise is extremely disturbing to people on the spectrum. And that's why some supermarkets, I'm glad to say, have started to introduce quiet times where they turn the lights down, stop the music, and create a more peaceful environment for those people to shop in. That's the kind of thing we need to be doing in offices and all over the place, really, to acknowledge that there's too much noise and it's really bad for people.

Yeah, like personally speaking, I find it particularly distracting over Christmas time when you go shopping and everywhere they're absolutely blasting out Christmas music and it's generally the same few songs. Yeah. And that drives me mad. It makes me not want to go into those places, you know.

I guess it's over-stimulation. Well, yes, and it's also over familiarity. You know, repetition is not something we're very fond of. Even, you know, if you imagine your absolute favorite song of all time, if I sat you in a room and played it 100 times back to back, you would start hating it. So we don't really enjoy repetition, which is why the Christmas meme is quite distressing.

I mean, it's nice, you know, most people enjoy a bit of Slade and Mariah Carey immediately, but, you know, not for the 50th time in another shot. your nerve, it's the same playlist and it's quite hard to create difference and differentiation in that. Pipe to music is an issue. The independent research, not the research from the music industry, because their research all shows that we love pipe music everywhere we want to go. Well, of course it would say that, that the independent research tends to show that roughly a third of people like it, a third don't care, and a third hate it. And there is even a society called Pipe

Down in the UK with people like Stephen Frye and Daniel Barron Boyman, who are absolutely up at arms about it because they really object to having a sound condition imposed on them. Now, that's an important thing, because most of us do, actually. So if you started putting a sound into an office without asking anybody, most people would start to feel antsy about that. It's being dominated. It's taking our way our control over our environment. and people very much like to have some control over their environment, which is why sodcasting, you know, the unkind playing of loud music from perhaps a phone on a bus or, you know, a boombox or something,

or neighbour noise, these things are distressing to us because they're unkind. So let's move on to, you talk about the human voice quite a lot, which is really interesting. And there's certain sort of effects that you talk about, which is the idea that lower-pitched speakers are considered to have more authority. That's really fascinating. So what do we know about that? Yes, it's been researched, and it is apparently true.

And there's a fairly obvious reason for that. Big things tend to have lower voices than little things. And generally in nature, you want to pay more attention to big things than you do to little things. You know, you're not threatened by a mouse, but you might be threatened by an elephant. or a lion. So we have this kind of genetic association of depth with significance. And that's really, I think, the genesis of that. And it's why Margaret Thatcher went to a voice coach and trained to lower her voice by two full tones because she felt it made her more authoritative when she was speaking in the house. So yes, we tend to vote for politicians with deeper voices, other things

be equal, of course. So having said that, why do so many? of us when we listen to our voices, I mean, speaking personally, listen to them recorded back, think, oh no, that sounds horrible, do I really sound like that? Because we hear ourselves largely through bone conduction. It's not your voice comes out of your mouth and goes around into your ears and that's how you hear it. Well, you do, but most of the effect is bone conduction, which gives you a more bassy appreciation of your own voice. So when you hear it back, it's saying, oh, it doesn't sound, it sounds very weak and high end and so. So for, yeah, well, I'm sorry, that is how you actually sound to other people.

So the bone conduction doesn't exist for them. And incidentally, I think bone conduction is very interesting. I mean, I talk in the book about the future of sound. And there are some, you know, there are some very exciting things there. If we can start to control the noise and become more conscious and enjoy sound more, there's some technology coming, which I think is very exciting, spatial sounds, which is really happening all over the place with Dolby Atmos now and so forth. and also high definition music, so we can enjoy our music now in 96 kHz, 24-bit.

I mean, that's very different from the days when we used to cram a thousand songs into a tiny disc on an iPod at 64KBPS, you know, MP3, which sounded very, very poor. So there's some good things happening with technology and bone conduction, I think will be one of them. I think we'll be moving into that era in maybe five or ten years, where we'll be having maybe something implanted in our skull so that we can speak and listen to, it'll be an intelligent agent of some kind, a bit like Java's from Iron Man, probably very conversational, without any device shown at all,

without any headphones, without any ear implants or anything like that. So I think the future for sound is very interesting, We'll see sound as an audio interface, as a user experience, replacing keyboards and screens a huge amount, which to me is a very good thing because we suddenly get to look up. You know, you don't have this phenomenal, endless people walking around on pavements looking at their hands and bumping into each other. Or people sitting around a lunch table in a family all looking at their hands. You know, Sherry Turkle's lovely book, Alone Together is all about that. the sort of disconnection that we're experiencing because of social media, perhaps when we're interfacing with that with our ears and our mouths,

we'll have a bit more politeness because it would be slightly rude to be sitting around with a table with a bunch of people and having a conversation with somebody who's not there. You might say, I'm just going to go over there and talk to Fred for a moment. I'll be right back. Whereas we don't have that politeness when we just fish the phone out and start looking at our hand, serptitiously. So I think that the future may be better in that way. So let's have a look at problems with hearing then. So something that I personally suffer from is tinnitus. Me too. And I think that's due to, yeah, playing in rock bands when I was

younger, unfortunately, and standing next to the drums. You know, what can we say about these things? Like, what impact is, not everybody has that same experience, but what impact is all the this noise having on our hearing? Well, there is a big problem with hearing damage in the world. One in four people in the world has got damaged hearing now. And so, you know, that's billions. For even the more seriously hearing damaged people, because this all gets worse as you get older,

you're hearing degrades anyway. And if you've damaged it when you're young, as you and I have by playing loud music, then you have to really watch it when you get older. I've lost everything about 12 kilohertz, personally. And I also have tinnitus. I have a little eight, eight kilohertz tone in both ears, which, you know, you have to learn to ignore. There is no cure for tinnitus. It becomes a mental battle where you just simply have to learn to live with it. So that damage to people's hearing is

serious. And unfortunately, as I was just saying, even the most seriously damaged people tend not to go and avail themselves of the help that's around now. There are some brilliant technologies in the hearing aid industry. It's way different from where it was 20 or 30 years ago. You have apps, you can direct the hearing aids to work better in conversation in loud parties and that kind of thing, or for music. And so those things are available, but it's a pride thing. A lot of people won't go and get a hearing aid simply because they don't want to be seen to be deaf. And going deaf, you know, losing your hearing like that is a so socially damaging. It creates loneliness. I was on the train yesterday, actually, on the way from

Newcastle where I was speaking up to Edinburgh, and there was an old couple sitting opposite me. He was very deaf. He had a hearing aid, but I don't think it was working very well. And the relationship between them was so painful to see. She was so angry with him the whole time and she was just irritated, irritated, irritated with him not being able to hear, him not being able to hear the person who was offering them food. You know, it just, it separates you. It leaves you lonely, isolated, humiliated. It's a massive problem in the world. And it's there not just for, you know, people working in heavy industry who, of course, have had damaged hearing, noise-induced hearing loss for years and years. And they don't tend to wear the hearing defenders that they're

supposed to. Construction, same thing. It's a pride thing. I don't know those stupid hearing defenders on. But also, as I said, young people with headphone abuse now, putting 110 decibels into their ear canals for hours a day. We are raising a whole deaf generation. And yes, musicians, even classical musicians, you know, people sitting in the violin section in front of the horns, you know, those horns are very loud. Many violinists are deaf in their left ear because they hold. the violin right next to their left ear and when they're playing, you know, opera singers send themselves deaf because their voices are so loud. So, you know, it's a huge problem across the board really as we get noisier and noisier and one that we need to acknowledge.

But sadly, you never hear a politician saying, vote for me, I'll make it quieter. It's not a political issue. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Julian Treasure. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Sound Effects, how sound shapes our lives, our well-being and our planet.

If you liked what you've just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Insidgenius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel, at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice.

You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameaio.com. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step?

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