If we teach our children how to listen properly to the world - and especially to each other - they will understand the consequences of their own sound and be far more responsible in making it.

I have visited a number of boutique hotels where you feel there is a little bit of self-indulgence going on.

Sound changes moods, yet most of the sound around us is unplanned.

Unlike so many other sounds, there's no maximum exposure to birdsong.

Most of us walk around with our ears switched off because so much noise is unpleasant.

By starting to pay attention to our natural soundscapes, businesses can reduce staff turnover, increase productivity, and increase profits.

Without our natural soundscape, we are making ourselves tired, stressed, and frightened all at the same time.

Retailers don't think about why they have music. There are a number of issues. It can be very powerful in the right place, where it is played appropriately.

Music is made to be listened to, so you immediately have an issue where you're playing it in the background like wallpaper. Music doesn't want to behave like that.

You can't truly listen to someone and do anything else at the same time.

If you want to be listened to, the first step is to listen well yourself.

Most people think it's a linear relationship: I speak, you listen. Actually, it's a circle, because the way you listen affects how I speak, and the way I speak affects the way you listen.

People often mistake our mission at The Sound Agency for a crusade for silence, but actually, silence is in many ways just as bad as too much noise.

Sound in a space affects us profoundly. It changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretion, brain waves. It affects our emotions and our cognition.

We experience every space in five senses, so it's strange that architects design just for the eyes.

Conscious listening is very largely overlooked in the mainstream of education. It's such an important skill in life. And yet we expect children to pick it up from home or from peers informally.

You or I never buy an Intel product explicitly, and yet their sonic logo is far better known and more powerful than its visual equivalent. It's probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

While interrupting is not always wrong, it should never become a habit.

The need to be right can arise from a fear of being disrespected. Or it may come out of the fear of being seen as we really are: as flawed human beings who are perfectly imperfect and full of contradictions and confusions.

We all like to look good. However, this basic human desire can often get in the way of our listening and our speaking. This tendency often evinces itself in two simple words: 'I know.' But if I know everything, what can I learn? Absolutely nothing.

In the U.K., architects train for five years, and they spend one day on sound.

I've heard many reports of police attending scenes of domestic violence where they've had to turn off music and televisions and radios. Noise tends to drive us a bit crazy.

Music is designed to be listened to, so it's calling for attention all the time, syphoning off our very limited auditory bandwidth and elbowing aside our ability to listen to the voice in our head we need when we're doing mental work.

It's dangerous to generalise about sound because many of its effects work through association. These can be universal: we all instinctively associate any sudden, unexpected noise with danger and react with a release of fight/flight hormones, while most people find sounds like gentle rainfall or birdsong calming and reassuring.