Sounds Interesting
A bumper edition and a special announcement
Welcome to another tour through the wonders of sound, listening and speaking.
But first, my special announcement. In advance of launching my new course The Sound Leader (about which more later), I’m doing a set of three FREE 30-minute masterclasses on Zoom in the coming weeks, all covering the incredible costs of poor sound and broken communication in organisations, and offering ways to start reaping the enormous benefits of getting these things right. If you’re interested in attending, here’s some information about the first one on June 16. Even if you can’t make it, sign up and you’ll get a recording, and information about the other two. I look forward to seeing you there.
And now for the news…
Charisma isn’t magic, and much of it lives in your voice
The June issue of the Toastmaster makes a claim I’ve spent years training people on: charisma is nurture, not nature. Vocal coach Jillian Mitchell breaks it into presence, purpose, and projection, and notes that magnetic speakers use varied pitch, deliberate pauses, strong projection, and few filler words. In my book How To Be Heard, I set out a similar toolbox for the human voice, because most of us draw on only a fraction of its range. The encouraging part stands: you can practise your way to presence. The instrument we all play with is far more capable than you think.
Toastmaster magazine: Charisma Unlocked
The hearing aid that knows which voice you want to hear
The cocktail party problem, picking one voice out of many, has defeated hearing aids for decades. New technology reported by NPR and published in Nature Neuroscience decodes a listener’s brain activity to determine which speaker they’re attending to, then amplifies only that voice. For anyone who finds a crowded room exhausting (like me), this offers real hope as smart hearing aids converge with AI audio processing and neuroscience. It also makes a quietly profound point: listening is not passive reception but active selection. Listening, as distinct from hearing, happens when we choose what to pay attention to and then make it mean something, and the brain does extraordinary work to help us do that. Our machines are only now beginning to catch up.
NPR: New research may lead to hearing aids that select one voice among many
We knocked down the office walls. Now everyone wants them back
Open-plan offices were sold on collaboration. Two decades on, the loudest demand in workplace design is for somewhere quiet, reports Allwork.Space. The Leesman Index, which has surveyed more workplace users than anyone, reports that fewer than one in three workers believe their open office helps them do their best work, and names noise the single strongest predictor of poor performance. After years of WFH, our tolerance for ambient chatter has gone, and it isn’t coming back. Good acoustic design and sound masking are key, as we’re not likely to be giving anyone a door to close in the future. Leaders are finally hearing the message: there’s a return on good sound and a cost of noise.
Allwork.Space: The quiet office paradox, why open-plan work created demand for enclosed privacy
The hearing damage from a great night out that you won’t notice for years
As festival season opens, a timely warning. Research in Scientific Reports finds that a single large music event can cause subclinical hearing damage, the hidden kind that standard tests miss. Known as cochlear synaptopathy, it quietly frays the connections that let us follow one voice in a noisy room, while leaving the audiogram looking fine. The WHO reckons over a billion young people are at risk from unsafe listening, largely in the form of headphone abuse where loud music is poured into ear canals for hours a day. None of this means avoiding live music. It means a decent pair of earplugs is no longer the preserve of the cautious. Your future self will thank you.
As a long-time drummer, I can vouch for this. I have lost everything above about 8 kHz, and I have tinnitus in both ears. This is definitely related to the many years of smashing cymbals only feet from my ears, especially when boxed in by perspex screens, before I learned about the effects and got myself some ACS silicon moulded earplugs with filters that attenuated all sound by 15 dB. Don’t leave it as long as I did. You can get effective hearing protection from the ACS link above or find other types at your local audiologist; they’re often based in or above an optician.
Scientific Reports: Large-scale music events can cause subclinical hearing damage
Quiet returns for the ringing ears, and the evidence is firming up
Tinnitus, the phantom ringing that affects perhaps one adult in seven, has long had no effective remedy beyond coping strategies. That may be shifting. In a 2025 study of people with moderate to severe tinnitus, more than nine in ten reported meaningful improvement after using Lenire, a device that pairs sound with gentle stimulation of the tongue, with the severest cases showing a sharp decline. Also, new drug candidates targeting the inner ear are entering human trials this year. Tinnitus is something the ear and brain produce together, not as a fault in the ear alone. At last, the medical establishment is starting to understand this.
AARP: New tinnitus treatment helps many who suffer from ringing in the ears Hashir Tinnitus Clinic: Annual Tinnitus Report 2026
Spatial sound is escaping the cinema and following you around
Spatial audio had a busy start to 2026. THX unveiled Spatial Audio+ with AI head tracking for headphones, laptops, and soundbars, so the sound field stays put as you turn your head. Pioneer’s new Sphera receiver brings Dolby Atmos to older cars through Apple CarPlay. The promise is sound with height and depth rather than a flat wall in front of you, closer to the way we actually hear the world. Used appropriately, spatial audio will undoubtedly make everyday listening richer and possibly also less tiring.
I’ve heard luddites complain that this is all newfangled nonsense because we have only two ears – but that does not map onto having only two sources of sound. We hear in a sphere that includes above, below, and behind us. I had the extraordinary experience at TED 2026 of sitting in the middle of an orchestra while they played, and it was overwhelmingly powerful, moving, and beautiful to experience the sound coming from everywhere. Even when you see a performance on a stage in front of you, the sound is coming at you from all directions as it reflects off every surface in the hall. Spatial sound is the natural way to listen, and I love it.
If you want to explore spatial music, check out Steven Wilson’s new online store Headphone Dust, where his extensive list of spatial remixes is downloadable in MKV format (effectively virtual Blu-Rays), including Atmos, 5.1 and even binaural mixes. As well as his own music, he’s remixed many bands including The Who, Tears For Fears, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind and Motorhead. You can see more at Steven’s Substack .
Business Wire: THX showcases THX Spatial Audio+ and AI-based head tracking Cult of Mac: New aftermarket CarPlay receiver brings spatial audio to older vehicles
Vinyl just passed a billion dollars, and the cassette is stirring
The supposedly dead music delivery formats are thriving. US vinyl revenue topped one billion dollars in 2025 according to the RIAA, and What Hi-Fi’s Vinyl Week found the momentum holding into 2026, with new turntables, listening bars, and even a slow cassette revival. Some of this is nostalgia, but part of it is a real hunger for sound you touch, set up to play, and attend to in the order the artist intended, rather than stream, hop and forget. Deliberate listening is becoming a small act of resistance. In a world of endless background audio and short attention spans, choosing one record and sitting with it from start to finish feels almost radical.
In my book Sound Affects, Mark Ronson said: “Putting on an old record, where it’s meant to have ebbs and flows, and the shitty song makes the next song that you love even more enjoyable, I think that’s such a lovely thing about the process of listening to a record, and being able to listen the way the artist you loved intended it.”
Your phone, your car, and your kettle are learning to sing
As voice assistants and smart devices spread, brands are racing to own a sound, not just a logo. Trend reports for 2026 describe audio identities, or ‘earcons’, those short signatures that play when an app opens or a car wakes, becoming standard kit, and increasingly built and tuned with AI. As I wrote almost 20 years ago in Sound Business, every organisation is already making sound, whether it intends to or not, and most do it by accident. The question isn’t whether your brand should have a sound. It’s about how the sound you’re making is affecting people now (probably badly) and how you can make that impact positive.
Stephen Arnold Music: The state of sonic, 2026 trends in sonic branding Soundverse: AI music for branding and audio logos, how sonic identity is evolving in 2026
We are teaching machines to translate the language of orcas
The Raincoast Conservation Foundation has joined forces with the Earth Species Project to point machine learning at the calls of orcas, commonly and misleadingly known as killer whales, though they’re actually dolphins. The aim is to decode how they coordinate movement, share food, and hold a group together, and to measure exactly how our noise drowns all of that out. It is a striking inversion: our technology is filling the ocean with noisy ships that are deafening whales, but now it might help us understand what we are silencing. In Sound Affects, I describe the sea as an acoustic world where sound is survival. We are finally learning to listen to it, just as we risk making it unlivable.
Raincoast: New research aims to bring underwater noise’s true impact on killer whales into focus
The new mark of a luxury home isn’t the view: it’s the quiet
Acoustic design is shedding its reputation as an afterthought. Industry trend reports for 2026 describe a shift towards what designers are calling atmospheric silence, the deliberate engineering of calm into a building using recycled felt, PET, and other fibre panels that absorb sound rather than bounce it around. Open-plan homes of glass, stone, and high ceilings look beautiful and sound like a cave, and people are tiring of the racket. Sound is moving up the list alongside light and air quality as a thing we expect a well-made space to get right.
About time. My work with Armstrong Ceilings in the US, Oscar Acoustics and Sownd Affects in the UK, and HushOffice and BuzziSpace in Europe, has been all about raising awareness of how sound affects us as we live, work, learn, heal and play in the built environment, where we spend over 90% of our lives. Let’s start designing with our ears!
Ezobord: Acoustic design trends for 2026 Azula Designs: Acoustic architecture, why sonic luxury is the new benchmark for high-end estates