What we do know is that human beings have used music for thousands of years to create shared emotional experiences, from tribal rites of passage to religious worship or the modern dance scene. We even use it in war, to give our troops bravery or to intimidate the enemy; that’s what bagpipes were invented for. Never has a human society been discovered, no matter how remote, that did not have music, so it clearly is part of our nature, not spread or learned – though of course styles and songs travel, coalesce and collide constantly, especially in the modern, connected world of YouTube, streaming, downloads and public playlists.
While music is the most obvious type of sound that affects us psychologically, it’s not the only one. My company, The Sound Agency, often installs birdsong-based soundscapes, and for good reason. The birds have been singing for millions of years, and we have learned through the ages that normal birdsong means all is well. We can tell if something alarms the birds, or, even worse, causes them to stop singing altogether – a phenomenon that has often been reported before volcanic eruptions or tsunamis. That’s why normal birdsong makes most people feel safe, even if they are not conscious of this effect. Birdsong is also nature’s alarm clock, telling us that it’s time to be awake and thus promoting alertness, so this combination of security and wakefulness makes birdsong a very useful sound for working, along with many other activities. Just recently, research has shown that it’s also effective in aiding recovery from illness, so it seems that we instinctively like birdsong for some very good reasons.
The latest thinking about the multi-layered process of sound affecting emotions comes from academics in a paper from Lund University in Sweden. It proposes 6 component pathways in the process. In ascending order of complexity and subtlety, here they are.
Brain stem reflex is the physiological effect discussed above, most importantly the fight/flight reflex. Sounds that are sudden, loud, dissonant, or feature fast patterns tend to induce emotional arousal.
Evaluative conditioning is the associative response we considered above. You associate a sound or song with something, maybe a person or event, and that thing creates the emotion.
Emotional contagion is where we receive the emotion the composer poured into a song because we perceive it – in just the same way that seeing someone crying may make us sad. This puts me in mind of the hilarious scene in the film Bridget Jones, where Bridget is wallowing in self-pity and singing along with Jamie O’Neal’s version of Eric Carmen’s classic All By Myself.
Visual imagery involves conjuring up visual images while listening to the sound, so that emotions arise from the combination of the sound and the imagined scene. This is at least partly the process in play if you use gentle surf to relax or lull yourself to sleep.
Episodic memory is where the sound evokes a memory of a particular event in the listener’s life and the event creates the emotion (sometimes referred to as the “Darling, they’re playing our tune” phenomenon). Post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers may react strongly to the sound of thunder or any sudden bang for this reason.
Music expectancy happens where a feature of the musical structure violates, delays, or confirms the listener’s expectations based on previous experiences of the same style of music. Composers have used this for hundreds of years, playfully taking us down a path and then catching us out with an unexpected twist that causes surprise or delight.
Remember, all sound can affect your feelings, not just music.
COGNITIVE
The third effect of sound is on our ability to think, with dramatic effects on our productivity or effectiveness. This mainly because we have quite limited neural bandwidth when it comes to processing sound.
I have never met anyone who can understand 2 people speaking at the same time. Scouring the available scientific evidence, I have calculated that we have auditory bandwidth for around 1.6 human conversations. This feels about right intuitively; most of us know the feelings of overwhelm, frustration and maybe irritation that arise when 2 people are talking at us simultaneously, or when we’re trying to work on a deadline and someone near us is talking loudly.
As you may have noticed, we have no earlids, so unless you don headphones there is no way of shutting out distracting sound. In addition, we are programmed to decode language so a nearby conversation takes up one of our precious 1.6 bandwidth, leaving us only 0.6 to listen to the internal voice we use when we’re trying to work with words, symbols or numbers. That’s why another person’s conversation is the most distracting sound of all.
Research on people working in modern open-plan offices has revealed that variable or unpredictable sounds are the most distracting, especially when we have no control over them. After unwanted conversation, the most commonly cited nuisances are ringing phones and office machinery like printers or other people’s computers. This kind of noise degrades our ability to think, often dramatically: productivity can be reduced by two thirds in noisy open-plan offices! One survey of 1,800 home and office workers in the UK found that they were losing up to 2 hours a day to interruptions from noise, mainly from loud colleagues and ringing phones. The estimated cost to the UK economy was £139 billion a year!
Office expert Professor Jeremy Myerson has written extensively on this issue. He points out that we have different work modes, and that open-plan suits only one of them – collaboration, or team-based working, where the main objective is fast communication so it’s acceptable to interrupt neighbours without warning. When I interviewed him for a BBC Radio documentary on this topic, Myerson noted that this kind of working open-plan is like frontier territory in its lack of social rules. As he said: “The postman doesn’t enter your house unannounced and dump the post on your living room floor, but that’s exactly what happens in open-plan offices.”
Alert sounds in any environment are particularly disturbing – after all, beeps and buzzes were designed to grab our attention. If an alert sounds in communal space, it alarms not only the person it was intended for, but also everyone else in earshot. This is a major problem in hospitals, where the constant racket coming from beeping machinery has created a phenomenon called ‘alarm fatigue’: staff become habituated to the noise and cease to register the alarms. This doesn’t mean the noise has no effect: the unfortunate patients are also subjected to all these warning sounds, with serious consequences for sleep and stress levels, as we’ll see later in this chapter.
So, noise can interrupt collaborative working, as well as being bad for the health. A more profound issue, though, is that 4 critical work modes are simply not catered to at all in many open-plan offices.
The first is concentration, or individual working, which requires a space more like a library. Noise distraction and lack of quiet working space are among the top complaints on the Leesman Index, which has surveyed hundreds of thousands of office workers about what factors affect their productivity.
Tip: If you have an alert sound set for incoming email, your concentration will be broken every time it chimes, which may be many times an hour. Try instead turning off the alert sound and checking your email in batches at defined times, maybe on the hour every hour for 5 or 10 minutes, or first and last thing each day. You may find you become up to 3 times as productive!
The second is contemplation, or not working, which might be decompressing after some intense work or maybe gently sharing ideas in a social setting. The first of these is best done in a calming, Zen-type room, while the second requires informal, social spaces (isolated, of course from quiet working areas!).
The third is communication over distance, which often requires privacy. I have come across offices so quiet that the turning of a piece of paper is a major event. In these places there is no privacy at all, so one person making a call disturbs everyone else in the room – not to mention the uncomfortable, intimidated feeling that arises when you realise everyone is listening to your call!
The fourth is conferencing, or structured meetings in groups. Again, privacy is a major issue here: I have experienced many offices where