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partner’s mouth. Your aim is to get to a place of innocence, naivety, not-
knowing and allow yourself to rediscover what delighted you about your
partner when you first met.
LISTENING TO
CHILDREN
There was a Victorian parenting adage in England that ‘children should
be seen but not heard’. What a tragic way to teach the opposite of
confident self-expression! Banning children from speaking is definitely
not a good way to encourage speaking and listening skills. Every time we
shush a small child, we chip away at their natural, exuberant self-
confidence.
But does that mean we tolerate unconstrained vocal expression at all
times? Certainly not. The answer lies in careful, appropriate listening.
Children often get short shrift when it comes to our attention. We have
important things to do, people to communicate with, tasks or chores to
carry out… especially in this time-poor, always-on world where I see
many parents paying more attention to their phones than to their
children.
What a different world it might be if every child regularly had the gift of
proper listening, with their parent giving them eye contact, setting aside
for a moment any other activity or distraction, taking them seriously,
possibly being in empathic or active listening position. Children who are
really listened to develop confidence, and learn that they don’t have to
shout, scream or throw tantrums: they can talk.
I am not saying that listening is a sinecure for all bad behaviour, or that it
will work every time. But I do believe that children deserve to be listened
to as much as everyone else, and that listening consciously and fully to
children is one of the most loving things a parent can do.
LISTENING TO
MUSIC
I have loved music since my mother made a practice of buying me records
like
Carnival of the Animals
by Saint-Saëns, Prokofiev’s
Peter and the
Wolf
, and Britten’s
The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
to play on
the family’s precious Rogers stereogram, which still had an option for 78
rpm (yes, I am that old!). I remember my father bringing home a copy of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
in 1967 and saying it was
supposed to be the greatest pop LP ever (true even today, in many
people’s opinions). The first 45 I bought was
Ride a White Swan
by T Rex
in 1970; the first LP
Bridge Over Troubled Water
by Simon and
Garfunkel in the same year. I used to save up my pocket money for my
weekly pilgrimage to the tiny local record store, where I would browse
through the latest releases and choose the one I could afford to buy. I well
remember the excitement of walking home, impatient to play the
precious 45. I changed my school piano lessons to drum lessons (without
telling my parents!) and invested every penny in getting my own stereo
and later, at age 15, a drum kit. I have played music ever since, and have
been lucky enough to have had some wonderful experiences recording,
playing live and being broadcast on radio and TV through the years in
numerous bands.
If you’re getting the impression that music matters a lot to me, you’re
right! Playing in a band, group or orchestra develops a person’s listening,
much like the Mixer exercise we explored earlier in this chapter, because
you cannot be a good musician without listening to multiple streams of
sound simultaneously and being conscious of each of them to spot cues,
pick up-tempo and rhythm, and feel the way the ensemble is changing the
feel and volume. That responsiveness, brought to its peak in jazz music,
brings music alive; it is there in any group performance, even a highly
rehearsed one where all the players have the ‘dots’ in front of them and
every note is fixed. Perhaps this is why research shows that musicians
have slightly larger brains than non-musicians!
It was my musician-listening that got me into my career in audio
branding. I often listened to the world like a live performance, and when I
sold my publishing business in 2003 I really focused on my long-standing
observation that the world sounds pretty unpleasant, at least in cities. I
wondered: does this matter? Months of research later, I was convinced
that I had discovered a hidden opportunity to transform soundscapes
that were impacting with major negative consequences on millions of
people in shops, offices, hospitals, schools, airports and the like, and so
The Sound Agency was born.
Music has been here as long as humans have, and it’s everywhere humans
are. There is no culture on earth without it. It combines all the aspects of
sound – melody, harmony, rhythm and tempo, often enhanced by the
human voice and words. As a result, after the human voice, I rate music
as the most powerful sound of all.
You know what they say… with great power comes great responsibility.
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