5 Ways to Listen Better

In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, "We are losing our listening." In this short, fascinating talk, Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening -- to other people and the world around you.

Watch:

5 Ways to Listen Better

Vocab:

 

retain

roughly

extraction

recognise

signal

distinguish

pink noise

to discount

embedded

the flow of time

 

identify, keep, approximately, taking out, message, to think sth is unimportant, the passing of time, deeply part of, notice a difference, random ordinary sounds…

 

Pre-listening:

What is the difference between hearing and listening?

How long can you concentrate on something you’re listening to?

Do you prefer listening to music on speakers or with headphones?

Part 1. 0:00-2.00
Techniques we use to listen (extract meaning from sound):

 

Pattern recognition: example__________________

Differencing: example ______________________

Filters:

___________

___________

___________

___________

___________

___________

According to Julian

Sound can / can’t tell us about spaces

Sound is more closely / less closely related to our experience of time than other senses

The different reasons why we are losing our listening:

1

2

3

4

5

 

Part 2 2.00-

 

What is RASA?

 

R___________

A___________

S___________

A___________

 

What are the 5 ways of becoming a better listener?

 

___________

___________

___________

___________

___________

5 Ways Listening can change your life

Dictation

82 points

We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. (18)

We recognise patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name. (12)

When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. (21)

If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces. (31)

spend

use

define

create

recognize

retain

paying

discount

disappeared

promised

experience

receiving

being

fall short of

invented

take

pay

suggest

have

can

scream

get

becoming

cease

places

 

We are losing our listening. We ______ roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. We ______ just 25 percent of what we hear. Now -- not you, not this talk, but that is generally true.

Let's ________ listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction.

We _______ some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition. (Crowd noises) So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention" -- some of you just sat up We _______ patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name. Differencing is another technique we use. If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, (Pink noise) you would literally ______ to hear it. We listen to differences; we _____ sounds that remain the same.

And then there is a whole range of filters. These filters take us from all sound down to what we _______ attention to. Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters. But they actually _______ our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're ______ attention to right now. I'll give you one example of that. Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I ______ her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I _______ on a daily basis.

But it's a great intention to ______ in a relationship.

But that's not all. Sound _______ us in space and in time. If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces; you're aware of how many people are around you, because of the micro-noises you're_______. And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it. In fact, I would ______ that our listening is the main way that we _______ the flow of time from past to future. So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote.

I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening. Why did I say that? Well, there are a lot of reasons for this. First of all, we ______ ways of recording -- first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well. The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply_______ . Secondly, the world is now so noisy, (Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen. Many people ________ refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles. In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.

We're becoming impatient. We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites. And the art of conversation is _______ replaced - dangerously, I think - by personal broadcasting. I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the UK. We're _______ desensitized. Our media have to _______ at us with these kinds of headlines in order to ________ our attention. And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated.

This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening. This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding. Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening _______ these things happen. A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed.