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The Hindus say, "Nada brahma,"

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one translation of which is, "The world is sound."

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And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating.

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In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating.

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Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies.

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So you are, in fact, a chord --

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each of you an individual chord.

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One definition of health may be

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that that chord is in complete harmony.

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Your ears can't hear that chord;

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they can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves.

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Incidentally, we see just one octave.

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Your ears are always on -- you have no ear lids.

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They work even when you sleep.

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The smallest sound you can perceive

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moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters.

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The loudest sound you can hear

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is a trillion times more powerful than that.

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Ears are made not for hearing,

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but for listening.

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Listening is an active skill,

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whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at --

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it's a relationship with sound.

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And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught.

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For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions,

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places you can listen from?

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Here are two of them.

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Reductive listening is listening "for."

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It reduces everything down to what's relevant

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and it discards everything that's not relevant.

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Men typically listen reductively.

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So he's saying, "I've got this problem."

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He's saying, "Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next."

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That's the way we talk, right guys?

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Expansive listening, on the other hand,

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is listening "with," not listening "for."

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It's got no destination in mind --

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it's just enjoying the journey.

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Women typically listen expansively.

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If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other,

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possibly both talking at the same time.

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(Laughter)

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Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk,

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practice expansive listening,

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and you can transform your relationships.

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The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear

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is noise, surrounding us all the time.

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Noise like this, according to the European Union,

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is reducing the health and the quality of life

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of 25 percent

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of the population of Europe.

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Two percent of the population of Europe --

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that's 16 million people --

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are having their sleep devastated

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by noise like that.

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Noise kills

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200,000 people a year in Europe.

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It's a really big problem.

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Now, when you were little, if you had noise and you didn't want to hear it,

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you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum.

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These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler.

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It looks a bit like this.

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The trouble with widespread headphone use

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is it brings three really big health issues.

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The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined:

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"schizophonia."

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It's a dislocation

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between what you see and what you hear.

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So, we're inviting into our lives

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the voices of people who are not present with us.

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I think there's something deeply unhealthy

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about living all the time in schizophonia.

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The second problem that comes with headphone abuse

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is compression.

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We squash music to fit it into our pocket

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and there is a cost attached to this.

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Listen to this -- this is an uncompressed piece of music.

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(Music)

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And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed.

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(Music)

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I do hope that some of you at least

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can hear the difference between those two.

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There is a cost of compression.

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It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data.

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You're having to imagine it.

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It's not good for you in the long run.

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The third problem with headphones is this: deafness --

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noise-induced hearing disorder.

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Ten million Americans already have this for one reason or another,

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but really worryingly,

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16 percent --

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roughly one in six -- of American teenagers

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suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder

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as a result of headphone abuse.

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One study at an American university

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found that 61 percent of college freshmen

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had damaged hearing

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as a result of headphone abuse.

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We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people.

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Now that's a really serious problem.

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I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears

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and pass these on to your children, please.

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Professional hearing protectors are great;

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I use some all the time.

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If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford

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because quality means you don't have to have it so loud.

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If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice,

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it's too loud.

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And thirdly, if you're in bad sound,

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it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it.

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Protect your ears in that way.

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Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out.

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WWB:

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Wind, water, birds --

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stochastic natural sounds

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composed of lots of individual random events,

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all of it very healthy,

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all of it sound that we evolved to over the years.

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Seek those sounds out; they're good for you and so it this.

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Silence is beautiful.

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The Elizabethans described language

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as decorated silence.

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I urge you to move away from silence with intention

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and to design soundscapes just like works of art.

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Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion.

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It's fun to get into designing with sound.

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If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you.

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Sound design is the future,

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and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds.

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I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities,

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eight ways sound can improve health.

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First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy;

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it's also now being used to treat cancer.

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Lithotripsy -- saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel

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by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound.

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Sound healing is a wonderful modality.

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It's been around for thousands of years.

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I do urge you to explore this.

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There are great things being done there, treating now autism,

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dementia and other conditions.

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And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you,

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if it's music that's made with good intention,

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made with love, generally.

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Devotional music, good -- Mozart, good.

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There are all sorts of types of music

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that are very healthy.

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And four modalities where you need to take some action

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and get involved.

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First of all, listen consciously.

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I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that.

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It's a whole new dimension to your life and it's wonderful to have that dimension.

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Secondly, get in touch with making some sound --

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create sound.

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The voice is the instrument we all play,

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and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained;

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learn to sing, learn to play an instrument.

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Musicians have bigger brains -- it's true.

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You can do this in groups as well.

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It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia;

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to make music and sound in a group of people,

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whichever style you enjoy particularly.

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And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us.

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Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely.

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Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you

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at home and at work.

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And let's start to speak up

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when people are assailing us

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with the noise that I played you early on.

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So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now

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to improve your health with sound.

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My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful

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and if we all start doing these things,

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we will take a very big step in that direction.

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So I urge you to take that path.

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I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you.

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I wish you sound health.

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(Applause)