1. Get a voicemail system to receive your calls.
You can have a dedicated phone number that allows you to record an outgoing message and receive unlimited incoming messages for as little as $24 a year ($34 the first year) - that is $2 a month. (NOTE: I did not say $24 a month, I said $24 a year after the first year which has a $10 setup fee.)
The voice messages are then sent to you via email and you can play them back on your computer anywhere you might be in the world. You can find these services advertised on the net, but if you would like the name of the service I have used for 5 years you have to get either the Import Export Toolkit or the Exporters Master Training package.
Sidenote: everyone loves their children and grand-children but you should not put their voice on your outgoing message - if you do not like your voice, write down what you want to say and have a friend or relative with a better voice record the outgoing message for you. And, please, do not have your children or grand-children in the background when you are calling someone - you only get one chance to make an impression.
2. Get a dedicated fax number.
Here again you can use the same service as the voicemail and have them send your faxes to you via email as PDF documents that you can then view on your monitor and print out, if necessary.
Sidenote: I often use a dedicated fax number as a means of qualifying an import lead's validity - if an "importer" has the same number listed for both their fax and phone number, they are most likely just getting started, or are sample seekers who have no intention of buying anything. Don't waste your time.
3. STOP USING YAHOO AND HOTMAIL email addresses.
I have spoken to many people who will not bother to read an email if it is sent from a Hotmail or Yahoo email account. So when trying to do business via the Internet DO NOT try to do so with a Yahoo or Hotmail email account and expect people on the receiving end to take you seriously.
Gmail.com offers the best FREE email system right now and although it will probably reach a point where it too is looked down upon in the business world, it is still fairly new and does not have the BAD stigma attached to it that Yahoo and Hotmail have achieved.
BETTER YET - Follow advice on our last post about getting a website and begin using your own website Email system to send and receive your emails.
Yahoo and Hotmail email systems are two of the MOST restrictive systems that I and other business owners I have spoken to have found - many, if not most, of any email with the word dollar, or symbol for dollars $ or mere mention of order or other commonly used business terms will send your email into their spam folder. Oh and forget about an email with an attachment like an invoice.
4. STOP SENDING FREE SAMPLES.
Do your due diligence on a lead first, make sure they are a legitimate business and even then DO NOT SEND FREE SAMPLES - advise them that you will ship samples at wholesale cost and they will pay shipping "in advance" but that once you receive an order for $1,000 or more, you will deduct the wholesale cost of the samples from their first order. NO NEGOTIATION. Scammers know you want and need business and they will use this against you.
The above method was provided to me from the owner of a very successful vitamin manufacturing business (about $10 million a year successful) and it is the exact method his company uses, no exceptions.
5. FREE TRADE LEADS.
Forget about the trade lead boards, legitimate importer don't need them, they have the Internet and will find their sources of supply via the websites of the manufacturers and/or exporters. The majority of the FREE importer (buyer) leads are 1 person wannabee startups but the vast majority are SCAMMERS and FREE SAMPLE SEEKERS that will not only break your bank but waste your most precious asset - TIME!
There is a way you can find REAL importers using your best friend on the Internet - Google. I will not provide the exact details of how to find them as this is reserved for the BONUS resources we give to our customers who purchase either our Import Export training course or just the Export training course.
But I will tell you that GOOGLE can be your BEST friend in identifying REAL importers or REAL products that you seek to export and the key I will reveal is to learn how to use their "ADVANCED" search techniques. Other than that, if you want a full, detailed description of this search strategy you will have to get one of the two above mentioned courses.
Finding REAL IMPORTERS using the method I discovered is great, however, in the world of marketing, which type of lead is better? A lead that you find, then contact and try to sell OR a lead that has already seen that you have the product(s) they are looking for and now they have called you or sent you an email?
COMMON SENSE - the lead that is coming to YOU is the BEST lead you can find in ANY BUSINESS. And what is the best way to help potential customers find you and your products? Yes, you guessed it, a WEBSITE (re-read the post previous to this one).
Hope you have found value in the above TIPS and suggestions.
Ron Coble
International Trade Services
Can music be good (or bad) for you?
Just wrote this article for the ITHP website. I will in due course repost the whole article here, but for now I'll just link to it.
Audi Sound Branding Identity
Audi's recent announcement about its very comprehensive Sound Identity seems to have set a new standard for our industry. You can see a rather self-congratulatory 'making of' documentary here on YouTube, and several of my friends in the industry have blogged about it (for example Ruth Simmons and Karhelinz Illner. What captures my attention is the commitment of the client. Sound is being treated as an essential component of the Audi brand, not the icing on the cake, and resources been made available to work that through into consistent and on-brand audio in all Audi's marketing communication. This is a huge step forward, and creates a benchmark for all major brands to aim at.
But is it enoufh? I'm not on the inside of this project, but so far I have seen Audi covering five of the eight expressions of a brand in sound we differentiate at The Sound Agency - as shown in the BrandSound™ graphic. 
Audi have defined Brand Music (including the approach of creating a library for all future uses, which is excellent); Sonic Logo (the heartbeat); Advertising Sound (now consistent and derived from brand values); Product Sound (pretty well-defined in general in the car industry); and Brand Voice (including recorded on-brand and standardised voicemail announcements). This is a far more comprehensive approach than many, which is why there is so much excitement about this case study in the industry.
But I wonder if they are also tackling Branded Audio (podcasts, apps and other high-value sound given or sold to customers or other stakeholders); Telephone Sound (have they looked at their IVR system's structure and live voice interactions on the phone?); and most of all Soundscapes (are they redesigning the aural experience of being in their showrooms? For example I know that the huge flagship Audi showroom in West London is very challenged in that way, with plenty of unpleasant noise and challenging acoustics). The research is clear and comprehensive on the importance of retail soundscapes in terms of their effect on sales - but in my experience most car showrooms have predominantly hard surfaces causing unsuitably long reverberation times, and the sound sources tend to be uncontrolled - for example SkyTVNews on plasma screens or commercial radio playing on ceiling loudspeakers, or even both at the same time. That kind of set up pipes in negative messages (such as bad news) and inappropriate sound (such as fast-paced music) and even allows competing brands to advertise into your own branded space, which is obviously undesirable. The far better alternative is branded, generative soundscapes designed to create an appropriate ambience and to enhance the desired state in visitors, which for showrooms is relaxed, unhurried and alert.
A truly comprehensive approach to BrandSound™ will cover all auditory interactions. Audi's commitment is a welcome inspiration to its peers, but it seems there is still potential for them to explore.
Skavlan and TEDxNewSt
Last week I appeared on the top chat show for Sweden and Norway. It's called Skavlan after its host, Fredrik Skavlan. I had a great time doing the show and they've now posted it here on the website of Norwegian TV; it'll be up until November 21.
They've edited it, so some of my lists are cut short, and my plea for businesses to take control of the sound they're making has disappeared - but overall it still gets the message across that we all can gain from listeing consciously, and businesses can gain from making sound consciously. I was last on the show, so it might help to know that Norwegian comedienne Anne-Kat had joked that bands have a pecking order for getting girls with the drummer always at the bottom, and that Swedish pop star Håkan Hellström had been talking about being brought up by a child psychiatrist mother.
My TEDx talk on brands and sound has also just gone up on the TEDx YouTube channel here.
Retail sound: article in The Grocer
The Grocer is the UK's leading magazine for the retail trade. I've only just learned that it featured a major article about sound and retail in July - and here it is. I'm featured, along with Professors Adrian North and Charles Spence, as well as my friend Simon Harrop from BRAND sense agency. I think it's very powerful review of the great opportunity many retailers have yet to explore: creating appropriate, effective and branded soundscapes in their retail spaces.
Stockholm - soundscape leader?
I'm in lovely sunny Stockholm today, just for one day, to record an appearance on Skavlan, the top Swedish/Norwegian chat show, which came about because of my second TED talk on sound and health. This is a very exciting opportunity to raise the consciousness of sound of three million people so I hope I get the message across! I type this blog in my dressing room minutes before going on... I am happy to report that Fredrik Skavlan is absolutely charming and he and his lovely team have put me very much at ease.
Next visit to Stockholm I hope to swing by the University, which is home to the Soundscape Support to Health project, started by Birgitte Berglund in 1999. This is the oldest and probably the most influential scientific soundscape project in the world; Professor advises the WHO on the health effects of soundscapes, and the group, led by Östen Axelsson, is working on an ISO definition of soundscape quality. Stockholm University has just hosted a global conference on Designing Soundscape for Sustainable Urban Development, so this is the current hotspot for urban soundscape thinking. Exciting stuff, and with clarity I think will come feedback on what (and how) to improve. There is hope for our poor urban ears!
While here I visited the Museum of Architecture, where (almost lost among the huge visual exhibits) there is a small exhibition by Björn Hellström on aural architecture. It's in two parts. The first shows a model of the proposed massive redevelopment of the Slussen area, and with a simple before and after sound installation demonstrates how bad it will sound if nobody pays attention to the noise levels and installs acoustic treatments. Hellström's point is that aural architecture falls between the cracks: no town planner, architect, designer, engineer or councillor is tasked with thinking about it, so they all miss it and the result is the usual - accidental and unpleasant, just the exhaust gas of the urban machine. He argues for a new breed of 'acoustic architect' - though I prefer the term aural architect coined by Barry Blesser in his fabulous book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? - one person who is completely focused on the question: how will this building sound?
The second part is more fun and equally thought-provoking. It's a single darkened room with a multi-channel sound installation on 10 lovely Genelec loudspeakers, which simulate the soundscape in Mariatorget, a square with busy roads at both ends in which there is a permanent sound and light installation. As usual, the sound feels much more intrusive when you can't see what's making it - much like what happens when I play clients their retail soundscapes on headphones. Our eyes acts as a kind of automatic compressor, preparing us for sounds a fraction in advance. Without the visual cues, the traffic noise in the installation is dominating, and leaving the room creates a visceral effect of peace. Whilst inside the installation, habituation occurs and the more delicate sounds of the art installation - chimes and light leaf sounds - emerge. The question Hellström's asking in this piece is: what happens when we see things we can't hear, and hear things we can't see? Does it matter? This resonates greatly with the schizophonia concept from Murray Schafer that I discussed in my TED talk and that seems to have rattled quite a few cages on the forums. It's an important question for modern living in my opinion, and one that needs to be researched.
The second part is more fun and equally thought-provoking. It's a single darkened room with a multi-channel sound installation on 10 lovely Genelec loudspeakers, which simulate the soundscape in Mariatorget, a square with busy roads at both ends in which there is a permanent sound and light installation. As usual, the sound feels much more intrusive when you can't see what's making it - much like what happens when I play clients their retail soundscapes on headphones. Our eyes acts as a kind of automatic compressor, preparing us for sounds a fraction in advance. Without the visual cues, the traffic noise in the installation is dominating, and leaving the room creates a visceral effect of peace. Whilst inside the installation, habituation occurs and the more delicate sounds of the art installation - chimes and light leaf sounds - emerge. The question Hellström's asking in this piece is: what happens when we see things we can't hear, and hear things we can't see? Does it matter? This resonates greatly with the schizophonia concept from Murray Schafer that I discussed in my TED talk and that seems to have rattled quite a few cages on the forums. It's an important question for modern living in my opinion, and one that needs to be researched.
Next visit to Stockholm I hope to swing by the University, which is home to the Soundscape Support to Health project, started by Birgitte Berglund in 1999. This is the oldest and probably the most influential scientific soundscape project in the world; Professor advises the WHO on the health effects of soundscapes, and the group, led by Östen Axelsson, is working on an ISO definition of soundscape quality. Stockholm University has just hosted a global conference on Designing Soundscape for Sustainable Urban Development, so this is the current hotspot for urban soundscape thinking. Exciting stuff, and with clarity I think will come feedback on what (and how) to improve. There is hope for our poor urban ears!
Digital Media Require New Pricing Methods
Newspaper publishers need to explore new methods of pricing content as they expand their digital portfolios because merely transferring the methods used in print can never bring the success publishers desire.
Print newspaper publishers have traditionally tended to set prices based on production and distribution costs and not on value created. Unfortunately, this has made it impossible to possible to obtain a price premium for factors such as prestige, service, experience, and convenience.
New digital operations, however, provide significant other pricing options because they differ in terms of whether they maintain the existing content bundle, whether non-payers can be excluded from use, the types of experience they deliver and how they are used.
Digital media require significant new thinking because they tend to be joint and complementary products with print. These lend themselves to selling strategies of bundling and versioning that permit uses of bundle pricing, option pricing, multiple purchase pricing, differential access pricing, and inventory based pricing that have not typically been used in the newspaper industry.
Pricing is particularly complex in the digital environment because the number of price choices grow exponentially. In the print product managers price advertising and the circulation, but when they add an online product they have to make 8 choices because they are shifting to a multisided platform operation. If mobile, social media and other print products are added to the portfolio, one must give significant thought to the roles each plays in the portfolio and the interactions of pricing choices among them.
Although digital media use is growing significantly, companies need to be pragmatic in their investments and operations and their hopes for new revenue. Online consumption is still only about 10 percent of all media use and online advertising is still only about 13% of offline advertising. Those numbers are significant and rising so companies needs to seek and exploit opportunities in digital spaces, but managers cannot expect those to immediately replace the contributions of their legacy operations.
Print newspaper publishers have traditionally tended to set prices based on production and distribution costs and not on value created. Unfortunately, this has made it impossible to possible to obtain a price premium for factors such as prestige, service, experience, and convenience.
New digital operations, however, provide significant other pricing options because they differ in terms of whether they maintain the existing content bundle, whether non-payers can be excluded from use, the types of experience they deliver and how they are used.
Digital media require significant new thinking because they tend to be joint and complementary products with print. These lend themselves to selling strategies of bundling and versioning that permit uses of bundle pricing, option pricing, multiple purchase pricing, differential access pricing, and inventory based pricing that have not typically been used in the newspaper industry.
Pricing is particularly complex in the digital environment because the number of price choices grow exponentially. In the print product managers price advertising and the circulation, but when they add an online product they have to make 8 choices because they are shifting to a multisided platform operation. If mobile, social media and other print products are added to the portfolio, one must give significant thought to the roles each plays in the portfolio and the interactions of pricing choices among them.
Although digital media use is growing significantly, companies need to be pragmatic in their investments and operations and their hopes for new revenue. Online consumption is still only about 10 percent of all media use and online advertising is still only about 13% of offline advertising. Those numbers are significant and rising so companies needs to seek and exploit opportunities in digital spaces, but managers cannot expect those to immediately replace the contributions of their legacy operations.
International Trade Leads
The previous post revealed how the oldest and most reliable publishers of international trade leads are or have gone out of business, including the US government's trade leads services.
For those of you who read my newsletter of blogs, you know I don't beat around the bush as we say here in Central Pennsylvania and this post isn't going to be any different.
If you wish to waste your valuable life's time chasing your tail and getting NO WHERE like tens of thousands of other exporter wannabees, then keep going to the FREE trade lead boards.
Although these boards were all started with GOOD intent, the scammers and spammers soon took over. Little wonder why legitimate Importers NO LONGER post their requirements on these boards?
In 22 1/2 years in business, I have spoken with hundreds of REAL exporters and importers and IN "ALL" instances when I rememebered to ask, NOT ONE has found these boards to be profitbable.
For those of you who read my newsletter of blogs, you know I don't beat around the bush as we say here in Central Pennsylvania and this post isn't going to be any different.
If you wish to waste your valuable life's time chasing your tail and getting NO WHERE like tens of thousands of other exporter wannabees, then keep going to the FREE trade lead boards.
Although these boards were all started with GOOD intent, the scammers and spammers soon took over. Little wonder why legitimate Importers NO LONGER post their requirements on these boards?
In 22 1/2 years in business, I have spoken with hundreds of REAL exporters and importers and IN "ALL" instances when I rememebered to ask, NOT ONE has found these boards to be profitbable.
Even a USA based car exporter who advertises on our site has told me privately that he pays the several hundred dollar fee to be a "background" checked member and at BEST in nearly 5 years of paying this fee, he has only generated enough business to pay for his annual dues. READ THIS LAST PARAGRAPH AGAIN, SEVERAL TIMES.
This car exporter further stated that he will not bother responding to any of the FREE members of this largest trade board on the Internet, they are mostly inexperienced wannabees, scammers and spammers.
One of the weirdest phenomena in my 22 1/2 years in the import/export business and nearly 12 years of doing so using Internet marketing is how many people are "bent on free."
There are people out there who would rather spend hundreds of hours accumulating information instead of spending a few dollars to get it and once they apply it can have a steady FLOW of POTENTIAL BUYERS/IMPORTERS coming to their website and ASKING, YES, ASKING for more details, prices, etc. about the products they are trying to export.
"What Is YOUR Time Worth?"
I have 368 web pages within our website. These pages are WORKING for me 24/7 365 days a year. ONE WEB PAGE has generated more revenue for three of the manufacturers we represent than ALL of the other pages.
Once that web page was set up, I have not changed it very much in nearly 7 years. It is a very SIMPLE web page, generic in nature (HOLD ON I am about to reveal a personally discovered secret). It is generic in nature but relavent to all three manufacturers who pay us a steady income, one monthly, two every two months.
Here is the main title of the page and the subject matter, go check it out and be sure to come back and read the rest of this post: Vitamin Manufacturers
One "TRADE LEAD" from this generic web page is now purchasing upwards of $12K product from the one company every 2 months, ADD that up on an annual basis and their orders are GROWING. But again, this is just ONE trade lead, there are many more that generate revenue for us from the other companies and this ONE SIMPLE web page generates trade leads on a consistent basis.
So let's get back to YOU and Your Exporting business.
Whether you are an Export Management company that purchases goods from a manufacturer, marks them up and sells them to a foreign buyer or you are an export broker/agent or simply an export finder, having your own website to promote the products you represent is really the BEST method of generating international trade leads and often domestic leads for the manufacturers you contract with.
Believe me, in today's econonomic environment, a manufacturer does not care if the lead is foreign or domestic, a new customer is new business that helps keep them and their employees paid.
AND, again quite frankly, I DO NOT CARE WHAT ANYONE ELSE WISHES TO CALL ME OR WHAT I DO OR HOW I DO IT as long as the manufacturers remember how to spell my business name correctly on the checks!
SO BACK TO THE QUESTION - "What Is YOUR Time Worth?"
Now you can continue to PLAY THE FREE TRADE LEAD boards and waste your most precious depreciating asset in all of life - YOUR TIME or you can get busy getting your website established on the net and show your manufacturers some REAL trade leads.
Unless, of course, you wish to treat this part of your business like you do when using trade lead boards and try to do a site on a free hosting service and gather together ALL the FREE information you can find on the net about building a website and web pages and ultimately decide it is just too damn complicated and have lost that time forever.
Think how long it would take the average person to put all this information together, to figure out the best FREE tools to get, to get help when needed, and to stay up to date with what is happening (and to know what small part of what's new is important).
They end up working for pennies per hour. They could be pouring all that time and energy into building a business and making serious income per hour. Instead, they chase "free" info and tools for pennies per hour.
Even when they find free info and tools, the info is out of step-by-step order and that person would be missing so much software power because "free" just can't do 1/10th of what the complete website building tool that I have found in my 12 years of using Internet Marketing in conjunction with international trade. So again I ask...
"What Is YOUR Time Worth?"
And don't be fooled into thinking that the FREE web "BLOG" building program like WordPress delivers the same results as your own WEBSITE.
First, a "word" about WordPress...
WordPress is synonymous with blogging. It's a free platform for publishing news, articles, musings and other kinds of content. In other words...
WordPress builds BLOGS, not businesses.
If you start your business by...
o Registering a domain
o Finding and purchasing a Web hosting plan
o Sorting through thousands of templates and plugins
o Reading a variety of gurus blogging about blogging...
You're wasting your precious life's TIME on the things that count for little when building an electronic based business.
By the time you realize that you are missing the "everything else" to build a profitable, long-term online business like so many website owners have done with PROVEN RESULTS...
FOR PROOF POSITIVE RESULTS CLICK HERE
Summary? Many people drift into WordPress because everyone else does and because it's free. Not only is it not free (unless you value your time at pennies per hour), there is also the "opportunity cost" of the failed attempt.
Instead of having your own e-business earning increasing dollars per year, you have a lost year, or more.
The value of that time and lost income is much more than straight dollars and cents. There's...
Time lost with family.
Time lost acquiring new skills.
Time lost to relax.
Time lost with friends.
Time lost to do the things that make you happy.
For only $29.99/month, you save THOUSANDS of hours of precious time.
If you doubt that, head to the site below to find REAL stories written by REAL people. Solid, verifiable PROOF of success! You just wont find proof like this... these are real-world "how I did it" material, everything from a-to-z ("Asphalt" to kaZakhstan"). These stories tell it all.
No short-term "flash in the pan" here. Review their ongoing (unsolicited) updates. Their businesses (and their lives) grow, both now and for the long-term.
FOR PROOF POSITIVE RESULTS CLICK HERE
You won't find proof like this for WordPress. It does not exist.
Newspaper Companies Start to Think Beyond Today's Bills
The somewhat improving condition of the newspaper industry is permitting companies to move from merely paying operating expenses to finding ways to improve their balance sheets and looking for new opportunities. In recent weeks:
- The Gannett Co. has placed senior notes totally $500 million that will be due in 2015 and 2018. The notes financed at 6.375% and 7.125% will give the company some financial breathing space by being used to pay a maturing loan and revolving credits. In addition it negotiated an extension on $2.7 billion in revolving credit with Bank of America from 2012 to 2014.
- The New York Times Co. has cut its debt by 40 percent in past 2 years and is beginning to look at small investments in digital media that may position it for future growth. It recently provided $4 million in financing for Ongo, a start-up news sharing site that will aggregate stories from a number of newspapers.
- The Washington Post Co. announced it would repurchase 750,000 of its outstanding shares. Such a move will increase future earnings per outstanding share and boost shareholder equity in a tax beneficial way. This type of buyback typically occurs when cash is accumulating in the company and its stock is undervalued.
Science or pseudoscience? Sound, music and health.
My TED talk on sound and health has created a lively debate, I am delighted to say: my intention was precisely to get people thinking and talking about sound and its effects on health. I wish I'd had more time during the talk to give references for the claims and assertions I made, and one purpose of this blog is to offer those for anyone who is interested in knowing more.
This is also for all those who seem hung up on the concept of proof, and have used the term 'pseudoscience' in what feels like the same way the word 'witch' was used in Europe and the US. It's sufficient to damn, and no evidence is required - ironic given that it is itself an accusation of lack of evidence. This is concerning, because of course the scientific method is not at all concerned with proof: it operates by people proposing hypotheses and then testing them to destruction. There is no proof in empirical science; there is only a current absence of dis-proof. An approach which dismisses any idea or hypothesis because it's not 'scientific' is itself anti-scientific! The true scientific response is to take the idea and then devise ways of testing it. Out-of-hand dismissal is the real pseudo-science.
In a wider context, the stance that assertions are acceptable only if backed by evidence also denies some of the more interesting areas of human thought, such as philosophy and religion, not to mention large parts of the social sciences and much of modern physics and cosmology. Any comprehensive study of sound and music touches on many other areas of study, such as physics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience, and so must involve considering many theses and ideas that are untestable, or at least currently untested. I was surprised by the vehemence of some of the feedback to my talk, where people seemed very angry in dismissing assertions that lacked sources rather than investigating them, and where the very mention of the tradition of sound healing was enough to damn the whole talk as 'new age' - another of the heinous condemnations deemed sufficient for instant dismissal by the pseudo-science wolves. I like this perspective from the eminent psychologist Carl Seashore:
"Practically, metaphysics and philosophy proper are not separated, and they are not marked off in sharp distinction from science, on the one hand and common sense, on the other. In fact the historical development of any question, such as the nature of musical value, arises as the main question and soon takes on both metaphysical and supernatural interpretations. These are criticized in philosophy and gradually analyzed and clarified by scientific methods; this done, the information tends to be regarded as a matter of common knowledge or common sense." (Seashore CE 1938 Psychology of music. New York, McGraw-Hill p376)
I hope that my talk opens the minds of those who had dismissed the idea that sound can improve (or damage) health, and connects them with the work mentioned in this blog. And I hope that science does much more testing on the effects of sound on health so that we can see evidence for some of the hypotheses I put forward in the talk.
Let me give some background to each of the assertions I made, and clarify where I was suggesting a hypothesis or just giving a personal opinion.
"Nada brahma - the world is sound" is actually the title of a fascinating book by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. It spans science, religion and philosophy, and is thought-provoking throughout. Warning: much of it is 'unproven'!
Vibration / you are a chord - this is obvious from physics, though it's admittedly somewhat metaphorical to call the combined rhythms and vibrations within a human being a chord, which we understand to be an aesthetically pleasant audible collection of tones. But "the fundamental characteristic of nature is periodic functioning in frequency, or musical pitch." (Eagle CT 1991 The quantum reality of music. In Music education; Why? What? How? ed S Hauptfleisch p 43-66, South Africa, HSRC Publications). Matter is vibrating energy; therefore, we are a collection of vibrations of many kinds, which can be considered a chord.
Health as harmony of our vibrations. I qualified this carefully to say "one definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony." Taking the WHO definition of health ("a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity") opens at least three dimensions to the concept, two of which have nothing to do with the medical profession. This suggested definition of health is not a 'proven' proposition, which is why I qualified so carefully: however it is an interesting idea, still in the first of Seashore's stages of development (above) - and so may be considered supernatural by some until science tests it properly. For more on the idea of vibrational harmony and health, see (Wolf FA 1981 The body quantum: the new physics of body, mind and health. New York, Macmillan) or (Steve Halpern 1985 Sound Health: The music and sounds that make us whole. New York, Harpercollins) and try to set aside anti-'new age' prejudice to find out if there are any interesting ideas in there for you. I think there is plenty in this concept to explore and I hope scientific research turns its attention to the area.
On a philosophical level, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and Confucius all wrote at length about the relationship between harmony, music and health (social and physical). Here are a couple of references - there are many!
"Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful." (Socrates, in The Republic of Plato 1888 Oxford Clarendon Press p 88)
"The Yi Jing develops the notion of ‘grand harmony’ (tai he). It is the concept that the entire universe constitutes a great harmony. ‘How great is the Qian (Heaven)! From it the myriad things originate under Heaven . . . With the changes of the Qian way, the myriad things all keep on their own path of life. Thus they preserve the grand harmony’ (Yi Jing: Tuan). Accordingly, ‘grand harmony’ is the most important ideal in the Yi Jing. The world is full of different things, yet all these things harmonize as they go through incessant changes. The ‘Yi Jing’ is considered the primary text among all Confucian texts. The notion of ‘grand harmony’ sets the stage for all other Confucian ideals, social as well as individual." (Chenyang Li 2008 The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism in Philosophy Compass 3/3 p423–435)
New research by Jay Kennedy here shows that Plato not only wrote about the power of music on society and personal health - he embedded musical structure in his writings.
10 octaves v one octave. An octave is a doubling in frequency. The visual spectrum in frequency terms is 400-790 THz, so it's one octave. Humans with great hearing can hear from 20 Hz to 20 KHz, which is ten octaves.
Listening positions. This is a concept I develop in my book Sound Business - not research-based analysis, just a useful set of perspectives that can help people to be more conscious about their listening. As well as the two I mention in the talk, other listening positions include judgemental (or critical), active (or reflective), passive and so on. Some are well known and widely used; for example, active listening is trained into many therapists and counsellors, as well as forming the backbone of parenting and management systems such as Parent Effectiveness Training). I regret that my humorous explanation using affectionate gender stereotypes offended some among the more politically correct; the audience in the room, and I hope most viewers, found it amusing and the concept useful. I don't believe that generalisations based on gender are by definition sexist - sometimes they can be enlightening and helpful. But that's a whole new debate!
Noise stats. Where to start with the horrendous figures about noise and its effects?
The UK National Noise Attitude Survey (NAS) says that 24% of respondents in Greater London reported that noise spoilt their home life to some extent, with 10% reporting that their home life was spoilt either quite a lot or totally.
The 2000 UK Building Research Establishment report says that 2% of the British population - more than a million people - suffered noise of over 60dBA for 90% of the day. This compares with 1.2% ten years earlier.
The EU says “around 20 percent of the Union's population or close on 80 million people suffer from noise levels that scientists and health experts consider to be unacceptable, where most people become annoyed, where sleep is disturbed and where adverse health effects are to be feared. An additional 170 million citizens are living in so-called 'grey areas' where the noise levels are such to cause serious annoyance during the daytime.” (FUTURE NOISE POLICY European Commission Green Paper Brussels 1996).
The World Health Organization says that "Traffic noise alone is harming the health of almost every third person in the WHO European Region. One in five Europeans is regularly exposed to sound levels at night that could significantly damage health." Check the WHO website for more.
My claim about 25% of Europeans suffering from debilitating noise comes from the WHO study Community Noise by Birgitta Berglund and Thomas Lindvall Stockholm, Sweden, 1995: "Almost 25% of the European population is exposed, in one way or another, to transportation noise over 65 dBA (an average energy equivalent to continuous A-weighted sound pressure level over 24 hours) (Lambert & Vallet, 1994). This figure is not the same all over Europe. In some countries more than half of the population is exposed, in others less than 10%. When one realizes that at 65 dBA sound pressure level, sleeping becomes seriously disturbed and most people become annoyed, it is clear that community noise is a genuine environmental health problem."
The WHO is also the source for the startling estimate about noise killing 200,000 people a year. Noise does not just annoy; it increases the risk of death significantly. The WHO LARES report, available here, proves that noise causes many illnesses. It concludes: "...for noise induced sleep disturbances, traffic noise annoyance and neighbourhood noise annoyance, the identified health effects are independent of socio-economic status and housing conditions. The elevated relative risks are expressed in the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system and the musculoskeletal system, as well as through depression." The WHO findings estimate that 3% of deaths from ischaemic heart disease result from long-term exposure to noise. With 7 million deaths a year globally, that means 210,000 people a year are dying of noise. (I said 200,000 in Europe - my apologies for that error; hard to remember every fact perfectly in the pressure of a short TED talk. Nevertheless, even globally this is a horrifying number!)
A wide variety of studies have examined the question of the external costs of noise to society especially transport noise. The estimates range from 0.2% to 2% of GDP. The EU says: "It can be generally concluded from the present state of knowledge that exposure to environmental noise acts as a stressor to health as it may lead to measurable changes in e.g. blood pressure, heart rate, vasoconstriction, endocrine excretion levels and admission rates to mental hospitals... Present economic estimates of the annual damage in the EU due to environmental noise range from EUR 13 billion to 38 billion. Elements that contribute are a reduction of housing prices, medical costs, reduced possibilities of land use and cost of lost labour days.” (Future Noise Policy European Commission Green Paper 1996).
According to a 1999 U.S. Census report, Americans named noise as the number one problem in neighborhoods. Of 102.8 million reporting households, 11.6 million (11.3%) stated that street or traffic noise was bothersome, and 4.5 million (4.4%) said it was so bad that they wanted to move. For the category "other bothersome conditions," 2.7 million (2.6%) named noise. Additionally, 5.3 million (5.1%) said that they were bothered by building neighbornoise. More Americans are bothered by noise than by crime, odors, and other problems listed under "other bothersome conditions."
Then there is noise and society, with its effect on behaviour. The US report Noise and its effects (Administrative Conference of the United States, Alice Suter, 1991) says: "Even moderate noise levels can increase anxiety, decrease the incidence of helping behavior, and increase the risk of hostile behavior in experimental subjects. These effects may, to some extent, help explain the "dehumanization" of today's urban environment."
Maybe Confucious and Socrates had a point.
Schizophonia. As I did credit in the talk, this word was coined by the great Canadian audiologist Murray Schafer. In his essential book The Tuning of the World (1977) Schafer says: "I coined the term schizophonia in The New Soundscape [an earlier book] intending it to be a nervous word. Related to schizophrenia, I wanted it to convey the same sense of aberration and drama. Indeed, the overkill of hi-fi gadgetry not only contributes generously to the lo-fi problem, but it creates a synthetic soundscape in which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes are providing the operative signals directing modern life" (p 91). Schafer was always concerned about the 'hi-fi' quality of natural sound being displaced by the 'lo-fi' quality of much recorded sound - and that was before digital audio and compression were invented. My assertion that continual schizophonia is unhealthy is an opinion, stated as such - and possible a hypothesis that science could and should test. You only have to consider the strange, unreal jollity of train carriages now - full of lively conversation but none of it with anyone else in the carriage - to entertain the possibility that this is somehow unnatural. Old-style silence at least had the virtue of being an honest connection with those around us. Now we ignore our neighbours, merrily discussing intimate details of our lives as if the people around us simply don't exist. Surely this is not a positive social phenomenon? Again, research is required.
Compressed music. However clever the technology and the psychoacoustic algorithms applied, there are many issues with data compression of music, as superbly discussed in this excellent article by Robert Harley back in 1991. My example of course failed to transfer into the video, since all the audio is compressed for the web! It did work in the room. I have posted the sound here if you want to listen on headphones or decent loudspeakers and see if you can spot the difference. My assertion that listening to highly compressed music makes people tired and irritable is a hypothesis based on personal and anecdotal experience - and again it's one that I hope will be tested by researchers.
Hearing loss and headphone abuse. Over 19% of American 12-19 year olds exhibited some hearing loss in 2005-2006 - an increase of almost 5% since 1988-94. (Change in Prevalence of Hearing Loss in US Adolescents, Josef Shargorodsky, MD, MPH; Sharon G. Curhan, MD, ScM; Gary C. Curhan, MD, ScD; Roland Eavey, MD, SM JAMA. 2010;304(7):772-778), reported with comments from the researchers here.
The university study with 61% of freshmen showing hearing loss is from The Power Of Sound (Joshua Leeds 2001, Healing Arts Press p 92).
The rule of thumb that your headphones are too loud if you can't hear someone talking loudly to you over them is fairly common among audiologists. For example, Robert Fifer, an associate professor of audiology and speech pathology at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, says: "The ear doesn't care what kind of sound it is, it really only cares how loud that sound is and for what time duration." Fifer advises keeping the volume at a level where you can still hear conversation around you. "If you can still hear what people are saying around you, you are at a safe level," he says. "If the volume is turned so loudly that you can no longer hear conversation around you, or if someone has to shout at you at a distance of about 2 feet or 3 feet to get your attention, then you are up in the hazardous noise range."
The assertions that WWB and silence are good for you seem to be uncontroversial. Perhaps they resonate with everyone's experience.
Sound healing. This seems to have been a red rag to many of the 'pseudoscience' bulls. I was including music therapy and sound therapy in the one category. Music therapy is a well-established form of treatment in the context of mainstream medicine for many conditions, including the ones I mention (dementia, autism). Just Google 'music therapy' and you will find a wealth of references and case studies. Here are a few:
Katagiri J. The effect of background music and song texts on the emotional understanding of children with autism. J Music Ther. 2009 Spring;46(1):15-31.
Kim J. et al. Emotional, motivational and interpersonal responsiveness of children with autism in improvisational music therapy. Autism. 2009 Jul;13(4):389-409.
Stephens CE. Spontaneous imitation by children with autism during a repetitive musical play routine. Autism. 2008 Nov;12(6):645-71.
Music therapy is the use of music to improve health. Less mainstream, though intellectually no more difficult to accept, is sound healing: the use of tones or sounds to improve health through entrainment (affecting one oscillator with a stronger one). This is a very old practice: shamanic and community chant, as well as various resonators like bells and gongs, date back to the earliest societies and are still in use in many cultures around the world. Just because something is old and not done in hospitals doesn't mean that it's 'new-age BS' as some have commented. Doubtless there are charlatans offering snake oil (as in many fields) but I suspect there is much to investigate, and just as herbal medicine gave rise to many of the drugs we use today, I suspect there are rich resources and fascinating insights to be gleaned when science starts to unpack the traditions of sound healing.
Music made with love. Duke Ellington claimed there are only two kinds of music: "good, and the other kind". I suggest an alternative split: music made with love, and the rest. I agree with Manfred Clynes (check out his interesting theory of essentic forms) that music is an excellent transmitter of emotions - in other words people can receive the feeling that went into the making of it. That's what I meant when I recommended listening to music that was made with love - by which I do not mean the people involved were in a blissful state; I just mean that they cared about the outcome and were making it for its own sake, not for some other reason (such as money, status or contractual obligation).
I do think you can tell the difference - and I think it has a different effect on the listener. I was rushing to finish the talk at this point, so I couldn't qualify my specific recommendations: of course Mozart and devotional music are just some of the varieties that are often recommended by expert listeners such as Tomatis. I didn't mean to dictate taste to anyone - many kinds of music can be good for you (and what that means is highly contextual). But if health is equated with lack of stress, then it's hard to see how prolonged listening to music like rap and metal, with their prevailing emotional charge of anger and aggression respectively, can have a positive impact. There is plenty of research on this general area: for example see Heavy Metal Music And Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation, which includes further references. Personal variations are huge of course, and I have no doubt that for some people listening to death metal is health-enhancing. However, as a rule I expect that further research will show that music with a positive emotional charge is better for the health than "the other kind".
Musicians have bigger brains. This is slightly misleading as one commentator pointed out. A study by Heidelberg University's Schneider found that people with musical experience had larger amounts of grey matter in the region called the Heschl's gyrus. The structure contained 536 to 983 cubic mm of grey matter in professional musicians and 172 to 450 cubic mm in non-musicians. (Nature Neuroscience, 2002). This does not mean that all musicians have bigger brains than everyone else, just that music leads to an increase in size in this area. However, other things being equal, it does mean that practising music as I suggest will increase the size of a person's brain.
I hope this helps answer some of the queries raised by viewers, and makes a contribution raising awareness of sound and its effects on health. I welcome your thoughts!
This is also for all those who seem hung up on the concept of proof, and have used the term 'pseudoscience' in what feels like the same way the word 'witch' was used in Europe and the US. It's sufficient to damn, and no evidence is required - ironic given that it is itself an accusation of lack of evidence. This is concerning, because of course the scientific method is not at all concerned with proof: it operates by people proposing hypotheses and then testing them to destruction. There is no proof in empirical science; there is only a current absence of dis-proof. An approach which dismisses any idea or hypothesis because it's not 'scientific' is itself anti-scientific! The true scientific response is to take the idea and then devise ways of testing it. Out-of-hand dismissal is the real pseudo-science.
In a wider context, the stance that assertions are acceptable only if backed by evidence also denies some of the more interesting areas of human thought, such as philosophy and religion, not to mention large parts of the social sciences and much of modern physics and cosmology. Any comprehensive study of sound and music touches on many other areas of study, such as physics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience, and so must involve considering many theses and ideas that are untestable, or at least currently untested. I was surprised by the vehemence of some of the feedback to my talk, where people seemed very angry in dismissing assertions that lacked sources rather than investigating them, and where the very mention of the tradition of sound healing was enough to damn the whole talk as 'new age' - another of the heinous condemnations deemed sufficient for instant dismissal by the pseudo-science wolves. I like this perspective from the eminent psychologist Carl Seashore:
"Practically, metaphysics and philosophy proper are not separated, and they are not marked off in sharp distinction from science, on the one hand and common sense, on the other. In fact the historical development of any question, such as the nature of musical value, arises as the main question and soon takes on both metaphysical and supernatural interpretations. These are criticized in philosophy and gradually analyzed and clarified by scientific methods; this done, the information tends to be regarded as a matter of common knowledge or common sense." (Seashore CE 1938 Psychology of music. New York, McGraw-Hill p376)
I hope that my talk opens the minds of those who had dismissed the idea that sound can improve (or damage) health, and connects them with the work mentioned in this blog. And I hope that science does much more testing on the effects of sound on health so that we can see evidence for some of the hypotheses I put forward in the talk.
Let me give some background to each of the assertions I made, and clarify where I was suggesting a hypothesis or just giving a personal opinion.
"Nada brahma - the world is sound" is actually the title of a fascinating book by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. It spans science, religion and philosophy, and is thought-provoking throughout. Warning: much of it is 'unproven'!
Vibration / you are a chord - this is obvious from physics, though it's admittedly somewhat metaphorical to call the combined rhythms and vibrations within a human being a chord, which we understand to be an aesthetically pleasant audible collection of tones. But "the fundamental characteristic of nature is periodic functioning in frequency, or musical pitch." (Eagle CT 1991 The quantum reality of music. In Music education; Why? What? How? ed S Hauptfleisch p 43-66, South Africa, HSRC Publications). Matter is vibrating energy; therefore, we are a collection of vibrations of many kinds, which can be considered a chord.
Health as harmony of our vibrations. I qualified this carefully to say "one definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony." Taking the WHO definition of health ("a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity") opens at least three dimensions to the concept, two of which have nothing to do with the medical profession. This suggested definition of health is not a 'proven' proposition, which is why I qualified so carefully: however it is an interesting idea, still in the first of Seashore's stages of development (above) - and so may be considered supernatural by some until science tests it properly. For more on the idea of vibrational harmony and health, see (Wolf FA 1981 The body quantum: the new physics of body, mind and health. New York, Macmillan) or (Steve Halpern 1985 Sound Health: The music and sounds that make us whole. New York, Harpercollins) and try to set aside anti-'new age' prejudice to find out if there are any interesting ideas in there for you. I think there is plenty in this concept to explore and I hope scientific research turns its attention to the area.
On a philosophical level, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and Confucius all wrote at length about the relationship between harmony, music and health (social and physical). Here are a couple of references - there are many!
"Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful." (Socrates, in The Republic of Plato 1888 Oxford Clarendon Press p 88)
"The Yi Jing develops the notion of ‘grand harmony’ (tai he). It is the concept that the entire universe constitutes a great harmony. ‘How great is the Qian (Heaven)! From it the myriad things originate under Heaven . . . With the changes of the Qian way, the myriad things all keep on their own path of life. Thus they preserve the grand harmony’ (Yi Jing: Tuan). Accordingly, ‘grand harmony’ is the most important ideal in the Yi Jing. The world is full of different things, yet all these things harmonize as they go through incessant changes. The ‘Yi Jing’ is considered the primary text among all Confucian texts. The notion of ‘grand harmony’ sets the stage for all other Confucian ideals, social as well as individual." (Chenyang Li 2008 The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism in Philosophy Compass 3/3 p423–435)
New research by Jay Kennedy here shows that Plato not only wrote about the power of music on society and personal health - he embedded musical structure in his writings.
10 octaves v one octave. An octave is a doubling in frequency. The visual spectrum in frequency terms is 400-790 THz, so it's one octave. Humans with great hearing can hear from 20 Hz to 20 KHz, which is ten octaves.
Listening positions. This is a concept I develop in my book Sound Business - not research-based analysis, just a useful set of perspectives that can help people to be more conscious about their listening. As well as the two I mention in the talk, other listening positions include judgemental (or critical), active (or reflective), passive and so on. Some are well known and widely used; for example, active listening is trained into many therapists and counsellors, as well as forming the backbone of parenting and management systems such as Parent Effectiveness Training). I regret that my humorous explanation using affectionate gender stereotypes offended some among the more politically correct; the audience in the room, and I hope most viewers, found it amusing and the concept useful. I don't believe that generalisations based on gender are by definition sexist - sometimes they can be enlightening and helpful. But that's a whole new debate!
Noise stats. Where to start with the horrendous figures about noise and its effects?
The UK National Noise Attitude Survey (NAS) says that 24% of respondents in Greater London reported that noise spoilt their home life to some extent, with 10% reporting that their home life was spoilt either quite a lot or totally.
The 2000 UK Building Research Establishment report says that 2% of the British population - more than a million people - suffered noise of over 60dBA for 90% of the day. This compares with 1.2% ten years earlier.
The EU says “around 20 percent of the Union's population or close on 80 million people suffer from noise levels that scientists and health experts consider to be unacceptable, where most people become annoyed, where sleep is disturbed and where adverse health effects are to be feared. An additional 170 million citizens are living in so-called 'grey areas' where the noise levels are such to cause serious annoyance during the daytime.” (FUTURE NOISE POLICY European Commission Green Paper Brussels 1996).
The World Health Organization says that "Traffic noise alone is harming the health of almost every third person in the WHO European Region. One in five Europeans is regularly exposed to sound levels at night that could significantly damage health." Check the WHO website for more.
My claim about 25% of Europeans suffering from debilitating noise comes from the WHO study Community Noise by Birgitta Berglund and Thomas Lindvall Stockholm, Sweden, 1995: "Almost 25% of the European population is exposed, in one way or another, to transportation noise over 65 dBA (an average energy equivalent to continuous A-weighted sound pressure level over 24 hours) (Lambert & Vallet, 1994). This figure is not the same all over Europe. In some countries more than half of the population is exposed, in others less than 10%. When one realizes that at 65 dBA sound pressure level, sleeping becomes seriously disturbed and most people become annoyed, it is clear that community noise is a genuine environmental health problem."
The WHO is also the source for the startling estimate about noise killing 200,000 people a year. Noise does not just annoy; it increases the risk of death significantly. The WHO LARES report, available here, proves that noise causes many illnesses. It concludes: "...for noise induced sleep disturbances, traffic noise annoyance and neighbourhood noise annoyance, the identified health effects are independent of socio-economic status and housing conditions. The elevated relative risks are expressed in the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system and the musculoskeletal system, as well as through depression." The WHO findings estimate that 3% of deaths from ischaemic heart disease result from long-term exposure to noise. With 7 million deaths a year globally, that means 210,000 people a year are dying of noise. (I said 200,000 in Europe - my apologies for that error; hard to remember every fact perfectly in the pressure of a short TED talk. Nevertheless, even globally this is a horrifying number!)
A wide variety of studies have examined the question of the external costs of noise to society especially transport noise. The estimates range from 0.2% to 2% of GDP. The EU says: "It can be generally concluded from the present state of knowledge that exposure to environmental noise acts as a stressor to health as it may lead to measurable changes in e.g. blood pressure, heart rate, vasoconstriction, endocrine excretion levels and admission rates to mental hospitals... Present economic estimates of the annual damage in the EU due to environmental noise range from EUR 13 billion to 38 billion. Elements that contribute are a reduction of housing prices, medical costs, reduced possibilities of land use and cost of lost labour days.” (Future Noise Policy European Commission Green Paper 1996).
According to a 1999 U.S. Census report, Americans named noise as the number one problem in neighborhoods. Of 102.8 million reporting households, 11.6 million (11.3%) stated that street or traffic noise was bothersome, and 4.5 million (4.4%) said it was so bad that they wanted to move. For the category "other bothersome conditions," 2.7 million (2.6%) named noise. Additionally, 5.3 million (5.1%) said that they were bothered by building neighbornoise. More Americans are bothered by noise than by crime, odors, and other problems listed under "other bothersome conditions."
Then there is noise and society, with its effect on behaviour. The US report Noise and its effects (Administrative Conference of the United States, Alice Suter, 1991) says: "Even moderate noise levels can increase anxiety, decrease the incidence of helping behavior, and increase the risk of hostile behavior in experimental subjects. These effects may, to some extent, help explain the "dehumanization" of today's urban environment."
Maybe Confucious and Socrates had a point.
Schizophonia. As I did credit in the talk, this word was coined by the great Canadian audiologist Murray Schafer. In his essential book The Tuning of the World (1977) Schafer says: "I coined the term schizophonia in The New Soundscape [an earlier book] intending it to be a nervous word. Related to schizophrenia, I wanted it to convey the same sense of aberration and drama. Indeed, the overkill of hi-fi gadgetry not only contributes generously to the lo-fi problem, but it creates a synthetic soundscape in which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes are providing the operative signals directing modern life" (p 91). Schafer was always concerned about the 'hi-fi' quality of natural sound being displaced by the 'lo-fi' quality of much recorded sound - and that was before digital audio and compression were invented. My assertion that continual schizophonia is unhealthy is an opinion, stated as such - and possible a hypothesis that science could and should test. You only have to consider the strange, unreal jollity of train carriages now - full of lively conversation but none of it with anyone else in the carriage - to entertain the possibility that this is somehow unnatural. Old-style silence at least had the virtue of being an honest connection with those around us. Now we ignore our neighbours, merrily discussing intimate details of our lives as if the people around us simply don't exist. Surely this is not a positive social phenomenon? Again, research is required.
Compressed music. However clever the technology and the psychoacoustic algorithms applied, there are many issues with data compression of music, as superbly discussed in this excellent article by Robert Harley back in 1991. My example of course failed to transfer into the video, since all the audio is compressed for the web! It did work in the room. I have posted the sound here if you want to listen on headphones or decent loudspeakers and see if you can spot the difference. My assertion that listening to highly compressed music makes people tired and irritable is a hypothesis based on personal and anecdotal experience - and again it's one that I hope will be tested by researchers.
Hearing loss and headphone abuse. Over 19% of American 12-19 year olds exhibited some hearing loss in 2005-2006 - an increase of almost 5% since 1988-94. (Change in Prevalence of Hearing Loss in US Adolescents, Josef Shargorodsky, MD, MPH; Sharon G. Curhan, MD, ScM; Gary C. Curhan, MD, ScD; Roland Eavey, MD, SM JAMA. 2010;304(7):772-778), reported with comments from the researchers here.
The university study with 61% of freshmen showing hearing loss is from The Power Of Sound (Joshua Leeds 2001, Healing Arts Press p 92).
The rule of thumb that your headphones are too loud if you can't hear someone talking loudly to you over them is fairly common among audiologists. For example, Robert Fifer, an associate professor of audiology and speech pathology at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, says: "The ear doesn't care what kind of sound it is, it really only cares how loud that sound is and for what time duration." Fifer advises keeping the volume at a level where you can still hear conversation around you. "If you can still hear what people are saying around you, you are at a safe level," he says. "If the volume is turned so loudly that you can no longer hear conversation around you, or if someone has to shout at you at a distance of about 2 feet or 3 feet to get your attention, then you are up in the hazardous noise range."
The assertions that WWB and silence are good for you seem to be uncontroversial. Perhaps they resonate with everyone's experience.
Sound healing. This seems to have been a red rag to many of the 'pseudoscience' bulls. I was including music therapy and sound therapy in the one category. Music therapy is a well-established form of treatment in the context of mainstream medicine for many conditions, including the ones I mention (dementia, autism). Just Google 'music therapy' and you will find a wealth of references and case studies. Here are a few:
Katagiri J. The effect of background music and song texts on the emotional understanding of children with autism. J Music Ther. 2009 Spring;46(1):15-31.
Kim J. et al. Emotional, motivational and interpersonal responsiveness of children with autism in improvisational music therapy. Autism. 2009 Jul;13(4):389-409.
Stephens CE. Spontaneous imitation by children with autism during a repetitive musical play routine. Autism. 2008 Nov;12(6):645-71.
Music therapy is the use of music to improve health. Less mainstream, though intellectually no more difficult to accept, is sound healing: the use of tones or sounds to improve health through entrainment (affecting one oscillator with a stronger one). This is a very old practice: shamanic and community chant, as well as various resonators like bells and gongs, date back to the earliest societies and are still in use in many cultures around the world. Just because something is old and not done in hospitals doesn't mean that it's 'new-age BS' as some have commented. Doubtless there are charlatans offering snake oil (as in many fields) but I suspect there is much to investigate, and just as herbal medicine gave rise to many of the drugs we use today, I suspect there are rich resources and fascinating insights to be gleaned when science starts to unpack the traditions of sound healing.
Music made with love. Duke Ellington claimed there are only two kinds of music: "good, and the other kind". I suggest an alternative split: music made with love, and the rest. I agree with Manfred Clynes (check out his interesting theory of essentic forms) that music is an excellent transmitter of emotions - in other words people can receive the feeling that went into the making of it. That's what I meant when I recommended listening to music that was made with love - by which I do not mean the people involved were in a blissful state; I just mean that they cared about the outcome and were making it for its own sake, not for some other reason (such as money, status or contractual obligation).
I do think you can tell the difference - and I think it has a different effect on the listener. I was rushing to finish the talk at this point, so I couldn't qualify my specific recommendations: of course Mozart and devotional music are just some of the varieties that are often recommended by expert listeners such as Tomatis. I didn't mean to dictate taste to anyone - many kinds of music can be good for you (and what that means is highly contextual). But if health is equated with lack of stress, then it's hard to see how prolonged listening to music like rap and metal, with their prevailing emotional charge of anger and aggression respectively, can have a positive impact. There is plenty of research on this general area: for example see Heavy Metal Music And Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation, which includes further references. Personal variations are huge of course, and I have no doubt that for some people listening to death metal is health-enhancing. However, as a rule I expect that further research will show that music with a positive emotional charge is better for the health than "the other kind".
Musicians have bigger brains. This is slightly misleading as one commentator pointed out. A study by Heidelberg University's Schneider found that people with musical experience had larger amounts of grey matter in the region called the Heschl's gyrus. The structure contained 536 to 983 cubic mm of grey matter in professional musicians and 172 to 450 cubic mm in non-musicians. (Nature Neuroscience, 2002). This does not mean that all musicians have bigger brains than everyone else, just that music leads to an increase in size in this area. However, other things being equal, it does mean that practising music as I suggest will increase the size of a person's brain.
I hope this helps answer some of the queries raised by viewers, and makes a contribution raising awareness of sound and its effects on health. I welcome your thoughts!
My new TED talk
I'm excited to say that TED have chosen to broadcast my short talk on sound and health this week, adding to my previous TED talk on the effects of sound on people. The new talk is creating quite a debate, stirring up some hard-core fans of the scientific method because I dare to mention sound healing... strange that they don't seem to know about the traditions in philosophy and pre-modern science (Plato, Pythagoras, Confucius) of equating harmony and pleasing music with health.
At the same time the talk is attracting great support and positive feedback from many who are sharing their own experiences of noise, sound and health. I'm delighted to have had almost 20,000 views already in just a few days, because my aim was to open this conversation - and raise people's consciousness of the importance of managing sound.
Do take a look if you get seven minutes spare - and if you feel like it, share it with others and do weigh into the debate, either in the relatively civilised TED forum or in the wild and woolly YouTube debate. Links are below.
Also, for those of you in the UK, the Financial Times this Saturday (October 2) features a profile of me and of The Sound Agency's work in the column by Mike Southon (the Beermat Entrepreneur).
I will be posting a new log entry shortly with all the references collated to back up the claims in my talk.
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