Quotes from Julian Treasure

All of our physical rhythms are being affected by sound outside us all the time.

Retailers don't think about why they have music. There are a number of issues. It can be very powerful in the right place, where it is played appropriately.

I have visited a number of boutique hotels where you feel there is a little bit of self-indulgence going on.

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.

We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority.

We experience every space in five senses, so it's strange that architects design just for the eyes.

Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.

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.

We're designing environments that make us crazy. And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.

I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.

Music is made to be listened to, so you immediately have an issue where you're playing it in the background like wallpaper. Music doesn't want to behave like that.

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.

Most people think it's a linear relationship: I speak, you listen. Actually, it's a circle, because the way you listen affects how I speak, and the way I speak affects the way you listen.

I think it's pretty pointless, my children learning to use a keyboard - we will just talk to our computers. Why would we not?

If you're surrounded by noise all the time, it has a pretty bad effect on the spirit.

The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time.

A great deal of our work involves switching music off.

It's time architects start designing for our ears as well as our eyes.

Some of my best friends are architects. And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings.

The desire to be right can be very destructive in relationships.

Ears are made not for hearing but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something that we have to work at - it's a relationship with sound. And yet, it's a skill that none of us are taught.

If you're listening consciously, you can take control of the sound around you. It's good for your health and for your productivity. If we all do that, we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living in the world.

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.

My dream is to make the world sound better, but the only way to do that is to let businesses see that there is profit in it.