Quotes from Julian Treasure

We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.

Birdsong is a sound which most people find reassuring. There is a reason for that. Over hundreds of thousands of years we've learned that when the birds are singing, things are safe. It's when they stop you need to be worried.

Sound is complex. There are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.

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.

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.

I love reading other people's papers on the Tube.

I often go into shops and ask them to turn the music down.

By starting to pay attention to our natural soundscapes, businesses can reduce staff turnover, increase productivity, and increase profits.

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.

Sound is complex; there are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.

As parents, we tend to be in Tell rather than Listen mode.

Sound changes moods, yet most of the sound around us is unplanned.

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.

Not even a woman cannot understand two people talking at the same time.

I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, 'My goodness, you look ugly this morning.' Perhaps that's not necessary.

It would be some sort of shock horror story if a child left school unable to read or write. But we do not teach explicitly, or test in the main, either speaking or - much more importantly - listening.

It's a common mistake to speak the same to everybody. We all have different filters.

For the great speakers, it's all about the audience. And the feeling they have is that they're giving a gift, of maybe knowledge or inspiration or motivation.

Listening is a crucial aspect of democracy. Listening creates understanding, and understanding permits one of the most important things about every democracy, which is civilized disagreement.

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.

Unlike so many other sounds, there's no maximum exposure to birdsong.

Most of us walk around with our ears switched off because so much noise is unpleasant.

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.

My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, 'It's October 1 today,' and she said, 'I know, isn't it dreadful?' It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.