The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say 'I love you.' And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them.

Ears are made not for hearing but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something that we have to work at - it's a relationship with sound. And yet, it's a skill that none of us are taught.

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

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

Every individual's listening is as unique as his or her fingerprints because we all listen through filters that develop from our personal mix of culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations and intentions. That is why one person's musical taste is another person's hideous noise.

Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition.

Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.

We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority.

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

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

The Hindus say, 'Nada brahma,' one translation of which is, 'The world is sound.' And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating.

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

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

I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.

There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care.

It is a mistake to assume that everyone listens like you do: your listening is as unique as your fingerprints, and so is everyone else's.

Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again. If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet; that's absolutely fine.

If you're listening consciously, you can take control of the sound around you. It's good for your health and for your productivity. If we all do that, we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living in the world.

Sadly, piped music in so many public spaces is often just more noise. Rarely is it carefully designed to enhance our experience; much more likely it is there because retailers have subscribed to an incorrect view that music makes people spend more.

I think it's pretty pointless, my children learning to use a keyboard - we will just talk to our computers. Why would we not?

A great deal of our work involves switching music off.

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

In a room full of 60 to 70 people which is open plan and absolutely quiet, it's very intimidating to make a phone call. And if you do so, you're upsetting about 15 to 20 people because they're put off by your phone call.

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

The desire to be right can be very destructive in relationships.

Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.

All of our physical rhythms are being affected by sound outside us all the time.

My dream is to make the world sound better, but the only way to do that is to let businesses see that there is profit in it.

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

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

People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years, they have learnt when the birds sing, they are safe; it's when birds stop singing that people need to worry.

Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively, and behaviorally all the time. The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it.

A sonic logo on its own isn't going to do very much. We get frustrated with smaller brands who come to us and say, 'We need a bing-bong'. You just can't encapsulate a brand for £500 in a three-second sound. It doesn't work.

There's a little bit of protocol in the real world which is quite important. If you speak to me, we understand that we've entered into a social contract. But sound that you haven't given permission to receive is noise, and generally unwelcome.

We spend all our time teaching reading and writing. We spend absolutely no time at all, in most schools, teaching either speaking or, more importantly still, listening.

It's an interesting door opening, this use of sonic signalling - using sound to alert us in a more subtle way than a beep.

If you're surrounded by noise all the time, it has a pretty bad effect on the spirit.

You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. I have a tip for you: if you work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, with a soothing sound like birdsong. Put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be.

Some of my best friends are architects. And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings.

If you put music on top of noise, it's like putting icing on top of mud; it might look like a cake, but it doesn't taste like one.

You can detect a hostile listening or a bored listening or a tired listening or an excited and engaged listening.

We're designing environments that make us crazy. And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.

Music is the most powerful sound there is, often inappropriately deployed. It's powerful for two reasons: you recognize it fast, and you associate it very powerfully.

Your ears are always on - you have no ear lids. They work even when you sleep.

The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time.

I'm totally obsessed with sound. It's my life.

There's a lot of research now showing that noise, and the lack of quiet working space, is one of the biggest issues for all office workers.

Men tend to listen in what I call a reductive way, which is to say for a point, for a solution. You know, we like to have a problem and solve it. Bang. Thank you very much. On to the next thing.

We move through soundscapes all the time, and most of them are accidental - a by-product. Most retail soundscapes are accidental, incongruent with the brands, and mostly hostile.

We have the capacity for about 1.6 human conversations, so if you're listening to one conversation particularly, you're only left with 0.6 for your inner voice that helps you write.