ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Julian Treasure - Sound consultant
Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.

Why you should listen

Julian Treasure is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, airports -- on how to design sound in their physical spaces and communication. He asks us to pay attention to the sounds that surround us. How do they make us feel: productive, stressed, energized, acquisitive?

Treasure is the author of the book Sound Business, a manual for effective sound use in every aspect of business. His most recent book, How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening, based on his TED Talk, offers practical exercises to improve communication skills and an inspiring vision for a sonorous world of effective speaking, conscious listening and understanding. He speaks globally on this topic.

More profile about the speaker
Julian Treasure | Speaker | TED.com
TEDGlobal 2011

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better

Filmed:
8,060,876 views

In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, "We are losing our listening." In this short, fascinating talk, Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening -- to other people and the world around you.
- Sound consultant
Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it. Full bio

Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.

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We are losing our listening.
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We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening,
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but we're not very good at it.
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We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.
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Now not you, not this talk,
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but that is generally true.
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Let's define listening
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as making meaning from sound.
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It's a mental process,
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and it's a process of extraction.
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We use some pretty cool techniques to do this.
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One of them is pattern recognition.
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(Crowd Noise) So in a cocktail party like this,
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if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention,"
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some of you just sat up.
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We recognize patterns
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to distinguish noise from signal,
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and especially our name.
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Differencing is another technique we use.
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If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes,
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you would literally cease to hear it.
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We listen to differences,
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we discount sounds that remain the same.
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And then there is a whole range of filters.
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These filters take us from all sound
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down to what we pay attention to.
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Most people are entirely unconscious
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of these filters.
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But they actually create our reality in a way,
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because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now.
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Give you one example of that:
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Intention is very important in sound, in listening.
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When I married my wife,
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I promised her that I would listen to her every day
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as if for the first time.
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Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.
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(Laughter)
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But it's a great intention to have in a relationship.
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But that's not all.
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Sound places us in space and in time.
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If you close your eyes right now in this room,
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you're aware of the size of the room
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from the reverberation
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and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces.
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And you're aware of how many people are around you
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because of the micro-noises you're receiving.
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And sound places us in time as well,
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because sound always has
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time embedded in it.
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In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way
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that we experience the flow of time
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from past to future.
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So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote.
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I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening.
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Why did I say that?
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Well there are a lot of reasons for this.
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First of all, we invented ways of recording --
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first writing, then audio recording
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and now video recording as well.
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The premium on accurate and careful listening
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has simply disappeared.
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Secondly, the world is now so noisy,
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(Noise) with this cacophony going on
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visually and auditorily,
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it's just hard to listen;
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it's tiring to listen.
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Many people take refuge in headphones,
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but they turn big, public spaces like this,
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shared soundscapes,
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into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles.
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In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.
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We're becoming impatient.
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We don't want oratory anymore,
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we want sound bites.
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And the art of conversation
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is being replaced -- dangerously, I think --
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by personal broadcasting.
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I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation,
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which is sadly very common,
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especially in the U.K.
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We're becoming desensitized.
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Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines
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in order to get our attention.
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And that means it's harder for us to pay attention
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to the quiet, the subtle,
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the understated.
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This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening.
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This is not trivial.
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Because listening is our access to understanding.
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Conscious listening always creates understanding.
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And only without conscious listening
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can these things happen --
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a world where we don't listen to each other at all,
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is a very scary place indeed.
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So I'd like to share with you
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five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you,
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to improve your own conscious listening.
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Would you like that?
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(Audience: Yes.) Good.
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The first one is silence.
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Just three minutes a day of silence
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is a wonderful exercise
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to reset your ears and to recalibrate
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so that you can hear the quiet again.
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If you can't get absolute silence,
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go for quiet, that's absolutely fine.
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Second, I call this the mixer.
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(Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this --
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and we all spend a lot of time in places like this --
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listen in the coffee bar
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to how many channels of sound can I hear?
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How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to?
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You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake.
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How many birds am I hearing?
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Where are they? Where are those ripples?
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It's a great exercise
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for improving the quality of your listening.
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Third, this exercise I call savoring,
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and this is a beautiful exercise.
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It's about enjoying mundane sounds.
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This, for example, is my tumble dryer.
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(Dryer) It's a waltz.
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One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
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I love it.
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Or just try this one on for size.
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(Coffee grinder)
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Wow!
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So mundane sounds can be really interesting if you pay attention.
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I call that the hidden choir.
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It's around us all the time.
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The next exercise
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is probably the most important of all of these,
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if you just take one thing away.
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This is listening positions --
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the idea that you can move your listening position
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to what's appropriate to what you're listening to.
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This is playing with those filters.
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Do you remember, I gave you those filters at the beginning.
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It's starting to play with them as levers,
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to get conscious about them and to move to different places.
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These are just some of the listening positions,
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or scales of listening positions, that you can use.
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There are many.
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Have fun with that. It's very exciting.
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And finally, an acronym.
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You can use this in listening, in communication.
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If you're in any one of those roles --
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and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk --
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the acronym is RASA,
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which is the Sanskrit word
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for juice or essence.
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And RASA stands for Receive,
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which means pay attention to the person;
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Appreciate, making little noises
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like "hmm," "oh," "okay";
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Summarize, the word "so" is very important in communication;
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and Ask, ask questions afterward.
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Now sound is my passion, it's my life.
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I wrote a whole book about it. So I live to listen.
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That's too much to ask from most people.
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But I believe that every human being
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needs to listen consciously
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in order to live fully --
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connected in space and in time
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to the physical world around us,
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connected in understanding to each other,
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not to mention spiritually connected,
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because every spiritual path I know of
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has listening and contemplation
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at its heart.
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That's why
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we need to teach listening in our schools
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as a skill.
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Why is it not taught? It's crazy.
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And if we can teach listening in our schools,
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we can take our listening off that slippery slope
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to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about
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and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time --
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or at least capable of doing it.
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Now I don't know how to do that,
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but this is TED,
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and I think the TED community is capable of anything.
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So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other,
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take this mission out and let's get listening taught in schools,
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and transform the world in one generation to a conscious listening world --
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a world of connection,
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a world of understanding and a world of peace.
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Thank you for listening to me today.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Julian Treasure - Sound consultant
Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.

Why you should listen

Julian Treasure is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, airports -- on how to design sound in their physical spaces and communication. He asks us to pay attention to the sounds that surround us. How do they make us feel: productive, stressed, energized, acquisitive?

Treasure is the author of the book Sound Business, a manual for effective sound use in every aspect of business. His most recent book, How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening, based on his TED Talk, offers practical exercises to improve communication skills and an inspiring vision for a sonorous world of effective speaking, conscious listening and understanding. He speaks globally on this topic.

More profile about the speaker
Julian Treasure | Speaker | TED.com