Kindness over convenience: The sound of change
What if the way we used sound changed? asks Laura Montarroso Daher, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Music Collective. What if more thought, more time and more insight was used to make sure the noises we hear around us were more relevant to the environments in which we hear them, and more attuned to the way we might be feeling?
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We move through our days wrapped in noise, a layer we did not choose to wear.
An alarm rips the soft seam of morning. Headphones seal us into private weather on the commute. Cafés thrum, shops pulse, offices shimmer with air-conditioning and low-grade chatter, and our phones spit bright needles of melody every time someone wants our attention.
For something pressed so close to our nervous systems, we treat sound as decoration or, worse, as marketing wallpaper.
And it doesn’t stop. For something pressed so close to our nervous systems, we treat sound as decoration or, worse, as marketing wallpaper. We talk about playlists, not pulse rates. We talk about branding, not blood pressure. What we hear can raise stress hormones, tug at heart rhythms, loosen sleep from its moorings.
Sound can be a gentle medicine. It can also be a chronic, invisible irritant that sands away at us unti, l one day, we realise we are simply, inexplicably tired.
Above: Sound can seal us in or connect us to the world around.
If we zoom out from playlists and adverts, another sector is sketching the same truth but in quieter lines. Architects and urban planners now talk about soundscapes as well as skylines. Cities are not just grids of buildings and roads but acoustic climates that shape how people move, feel and recover. The hush of leaves, the rhythm of footsteps on stone, the murmur of water; these are not luxuries, but signals that tell the body it can unclench. Uncontrolled noise, by contrast, gnaws at concentration and corrodes wellbeing.
What responsibility do institutions have when they choose what people must hear in places they cannot easily leave?
What responsibility do institutions have when they choose what people must hear in places they cannot easily leave? What duty of care is owed to the passenger in a delayed, over-lit terminal, to the nurse on a night shift, to the teenager scrolling a feed where every clip shouts to drown out the last?
Organisations still think in the thin language of identity, jingles, logos and 'ownable' melodies. A sonic logo here, a catchy track there, a brand playlist in the corner of a streaming service. At best, this becomes a neat little sonic wardrobe. At worst, it is a clashing patchwork of tones, memorable perhaps, but indifferent to the listener’s state.
Above: Architects and urban planners now talk about soundscapes as well as skylines.
Let’s switch it up... imagine if the first question was not, 'is it on-brand?', but instead, 'what will this do to someone’s nervous system after the day they have just had?' Picture a bank where people arrive already nervous; sound could be chosen to steady rather than stir. In hospitals, where the stakes are written on faces and charts, sound could be designed to support focus and calm instead of battling against them. Even in digital products, those tiny shards of audio that mark a message, a payment, a ping of attention could be tuned to ease the body instead of jolting it.
Reframing sound as a form of care changes the brief. It invites questions like, who lingers in this environment? When are they most likely to be bored, rushed, frightened, raw? Do they need a cue to focus, a softening of the jaw, a loosening of the chest? From there, a sonic language can be built that works with the nervous system instead of against it.
Reframing sound as a form of care changes the brief.
This does not mean we turn every space into a spa or ask all music to float, slow and ambient. Stimulation has its own bright place. There are rooms, stadiums, festivals, runways where being sonically 'switched on' is the point. But the dial is more subtle than 'loud and fast' versus 'quiet and slow'. Tempo, harmony, timbre, density, the very colour of sound in the air all help decide how a space feels. That palette can be used with care instead of habit.
A sonic identity can still exist recognisable timbres, harmonies and rhythms that belong to an institution the way colours and logos do, but it can be drawn with physiological as well as commercial outcomes in mind. It can be mapped not only to moodboards but to emotional states, waiting, deciding, celebrating, grieving, concentrating, letting go.
Above: Those who commission sound for spaces, need to open their ears to what's being said.
To do this well, musicians, sound designers, architects, psychologists and people who can read cultural context would need to work together, rather than letting the nearest playlist or quickest generic track make the decision by default. We already calibrate light in workplaces. We agonise over the ergonomics of chairs. There is no good reason not to grant everyday sound the same seriousness.
Most listeners cannot redesign the soundscapes they move through. They cannot hush a shopping centre, retune public transport, or silence the default noises that apps insist on. But they can vote, quietly, with attention and expectation, complain when spaces are unbearably loud, praise when they are thoughtfully tuned, ask why certain institutions insist on making hard experiences even more jangling than they need to be.
To treat sound as nothing but a vehicle for messages is to miss its deeper role in how people feel and function.
And, for those who commission sound, from public bodies to private brands, there is an opportunity hiding in plain hearing. The forces that have made sound cheap have made it inescapable. That ubiquity carries responsibility. To treat sound as nothing but a vehicle for messages is to miss its deeper role in how people feel and function. To treat it as a form of care is to recognise that being dressed in sound is not a metaphor but a daily condition.
A society that treats sound as disposable will, in time, treat attention as disposable, treat calm as disposable, treat conversation as disposable. A society that treats sound as care will design its noise the way it designs its streets and its light. Each choice of sound becomes an ethical act, repeated thousands of times a day in studios, boardrooms and lines of code.
We can keep pretending it is just background, or we can admit that what we pipe into people’s ears is a way of touching their nervous systems and decide, deliberately, to do that with kindness instead of convenience.
