Part 2 of 5. The Architecture of Feeling is a series of long-form essays exploring how the senses shape our health, culture, and daily experience. Each piece examines a single sense — its history, construction, cultural evolution, and biological logic.
The Inescapability of Sound
You can’t close your ears. Nothing will drive this truth home harder than a gang of foxes screeching outside your window at 3am. And yes, I’m speaking from personal experience.
Eyes can shut. Hands can pull away. But sound is always on – it bypasses permission. Hearing is uniquely passive among the senses: always alert, always scanning. That made sense when humans lived in the wild, where a twig snapping in your vicinity could signal imminent danger. But today, it’s less protective than punishing.
Urban soundscapes are relentless. The low drone of traffic, high-pitched sirens, mechanical hums – all of it adds up. We call it ‘noise pollution’ for a reason – the term implies contamination. Picture an oil-slicked duck or a plastic-choked river. Now imagine your nervous system is the river. Not ideal, is it?
All this to say: sound isn’t neutral. Far from it. In fact, it has measurable physiological effects. Sudden loud bangs spike cortisol. A baby’s cry might make your jaw tense. These aren’t considered decisions – they’re reflexes. Sound travels faster than the speed of thought, triggering the brainstem before the cortex can interpret or literally ‘gather your thoughts’. Sound is the fastest messenger we have.
As I mentioned above, hearing is passive. In literal terms, it’s the intake of vibration carried through the air, which happens without any intentional effort. Listening however, is active. It’s the interpretation, the meaning-making step of the process. In a world saturated with noise, that distinction matters. Because when you’re always hearing, without ever really listening, your body becomes a dumping ground for unprocessed input. Noise becomes load.
An interesting fact: Hearing loss in midlife is now one of the strongest modifiable risk factors for dementia. This isn’t because sound is some abstract brain exercise, but because its loss fractures how we connect, orient, and process the world. How we make sense of our surroundings.
The Anatomy of Listening
Sound is vibration. But what we call “hearing” is more than just picking up noise. It’s the transduction of differences in those vibrations, large and small, into meaning.
The process of receiving sound is extremely intricate. It starts with invisible pressure (or sound) waves in the air. These pressure waves are caught by the folds of the outer ear, funnelled down the ear canal, and strike the eardrum. The eardrum vibrates, setting three tiny bones (ossicles — the malleus, incus, and stapes) into motion. This movement pushes fluid through the spiral of the cochlea, bending hair-like structures that convert vibration into electrical signals. These signals travel faster than visual input, zapping through the auditory nerve and into the brainstem, the most primitive part of the brain. From there, they branch out, shaping emotion, orientation, memory, and reflex.
This direct access to the brainstem is part of what makes sound so powerful. The brainstem isn’t where we think, it’s where we survive. You can consider it as the automated control centre of the body. It regulates heartbeat, breath, and startle responses. When we think about it in evolutionary terms, it makes sense: hearing had to be fast, because good hearing was (and is) itself a survival mechanism.
A Body in Rhythm
The interplay between external rhythms and the internal rhythms of the body is a fascinating two-way street. A steady bassline can slow the breath. A swell of melody can unlock emotion. But on the flip side, the rhythmic state of our bodies can tell their own stories: heart sound auscultation is still a cornerstone of medical practice two centuries on from its inception. Ultrasound is sound visualised, but uses sound nonetheless. Music, sound, rhythm aren’t just entertainment, they’re attunement.
Rhythm is especially potent. The body understands it instinctively: heartbeat, breath, gait and speech all follow rhythmic patterns. When we hear a beat, we don’t just recognise it; we entrain to it. This is the nervous system syncing with external input, a process known as ‘auditory-motor coupling’. It’s why we nod to music without thinking. Why drumming can make us feel calm and aligned.
This isn’t even metaphorical. Studies show that rhythm can modulate heart rate variability, stimulate the vagus nerve, and influence cortisol levels. These are core metrics of nervous system regulation. Rhythm and music can, in the correct circumstances, be to the nervous system what tuning pegs are to a guitar.
It’ll be obvious to anybody reading this that not all music soothes and not all rhythm regulates. We’ve all experienced the unfortunate assault of music that grates on you. But when we find the right tempo, the right frequency, the right sonic contour, something shifts. The body relaxes. The breath deepens and attention widens. This is no coincidence, it’s an in-built mechanism, and one we should be paying more attention to.
Importantly, this response precedes cognition. The body reacts before the brain makes sense of it. That’s why sound can feel so immediate, and why it bypasses resistance. You don’t have to believe in the power of sound for it to affect you. You just have to hear it.
Science in Practice
So we know rhythm shapes physiology. What matters now is how we use it — how we apply sound not just as background, but as a way to direct attention, regulate state, and support performance.
One study found that music with a steady, predictable beat improved focus and reaction time, especially in people prone to anxiety. Others have shown that instrumental music enhances repetitive task performance, while lyrical music interferes with complex reading (unsurprisingly). It’s not about genre, it’s about matching the structure of the sound to the demands of the task.
Generally, the most effective sound environments for focus, for example, share a few features:
Tempo close to resting heart rate (60–80 BPM)
Minimal lyrics
Predictable structure
Low frequency emphasis to reduce sensory load
Still, the research can’t account for personal context. Your brain learns associations between certain sounds and states. That means your most effective tools might already be hiding in your playlists – tracks you’ve unknowingly conditioned yourself to focus, decompress, or reset with. In that way, music becomes a form of nervous system hygiene. Not just passive mood-setting, but intentional state-shifting a la Pavlov’s dogs.
The most skilled producers know this intuitively, it’s evident in the prolificness of artists like Pharrell and Hans Zimmer. They work in structure and pattern, but what they’re really doing is sequencing emotional logic. They build moments the body feels before the mind understands. It’s not just craft, it’s a form of biological fluency.
So yes, lean on the research. But also trust your own responses. Science in practice means becoming more aware of how sound shapes you — and starting to use that knowledge, even in small ways. Kind of like how your fitness band might warn you of overtraining. It’s not always straightforward. But it is possible to move from passive exposure to active engagement. And that shift, however gradual, is where the power lies.
We’re Social Beings and Music is Social Too
Some of my earliest experiences of music were in Nigerian church. The music wasn’t secondary, it made the service. Drums, voices and harmonies moving through bodies as much as through air. Everyone took part, whether or not you knew the words, whether or not you could sing, you were involved. It wasn’t about performance, it was about presence. That’s the beauty of the environment. An unspoken agreement: music was how we gathered, how we felt, how we aligned.
School was different. I went to Catholic secondary school, where we attended mass weekly. The same idea of music in a shared space, but everything more contained. The atmosphere was more solemn, structured, maybe even rigid. You stood, you sat, you followed the rhythm set out for you. It still created a sense of collectiveness, but it felt more formal. That contrast stayed with me. Both environments used music to bring people together, but the rules around how you could respond were completely different. That was the first time I noticed that music isn’t just shaped by sound itself, but by setting, or social context.
As I grew older and got to explore my own musical interests, I began to feel that same shared current in places that weren’t religious at all; think concerts, clubs, festivals. Even as a member of the school orchestra. That collective sensation, unspoken but unmistakable, felt familiar. A sense of community.
I began to notice something: the experience extended beyond the music. You could often tell what someone listened to just by how they dressed, how they stood. Kids would come to school in velour tracksuits and baseball caps after seeing a G-Unit video on MTV. ‘Emo kids’ popped up out of seemingly nowhere at the height of the My Chemical Romance frenzy.
The link between sound and self wasn’t abstract; it was plainly visible. Music gave (and gives) shape to identity, and a way to recognise yourself in someone else. During those teen years when everyone’s still working out who they are, that matters. Other interests, like film or sport fandom, may have an impact too, but none seem to have the sheer power that music wields to unite. It’s so deeply ingrained as a mechanism for connection.
It’s something music has always done. Punk, gospel, reggae, grime — each came with its own position, aesthetic, and worldview. It attracted and landed with those who aligned. To be part of a sound was often to step into a whole system of meaning. A shared language made up of rhythm, belief, dress, movement, and feeling. It shaped how people found each other — and how they found themselves.
Music brings people into rhythm with one another. That sense of attunement, of ease in a shared space, is more than a vague feeling. It’s an in-built mechanism for co-regulation.
The World Health Organisation defines social health as the strength and quality of our connection to others. It’s (finally) increasingly recognised as a foundational part of public health. Studies have shown that social health influences everything from mental wellbeing to resilience, and even long-term physical outcomes such as cardiovascular health. Music supports it in ways that are immediate and embodied. It helps us feel part of something, even before we can explain why.
Belonging, it turns out, doesn’t always need language. Sometimes, it’s rhythm. Mutual recognition.
Sound Design for Life
In public health, we talk about the wider determinants of health — the conditions in which people live, work, and recover. These include housing, transport, education, income, and environment. What’s less often discussed is that these conditions are sensory, too.
Sound is embedded in place. The environments we inhabit don’t just affect our behaviours — they shape our nervous systems. A city designed without regard for noise becomes a city that quietly wears people down.
Yet noise is rarely treated as a health issue. It’s dismissed as a nuisance, an afterthought, not a pathology. But according to estimates, environmental noise contributes to the loss of over a million years of healthy life in the UK each year through its cumulative impact on: sleep, stress, cardiovascular health, and mental wellbeing.
This isn’t just about sporadic loud events; it’s about baseline overwhelm. That constant low-level noise means the body never fully settles. Urban soundscapes are rarely designed with rest or regulation in mind. And sensory inequality often maps directly onto social inequality: poorer neighbourhoods are louder. Proximity to traffic, construction, and overcrowding means the most vulnerable populations live with the highest sensory load.
Hospitals and care environments are seldom any better. Though designed for recovery, they are often acoustically dysregulating: alarms, intercoms, bleeps, clanking metal, ambient hums.
Studies show that hospital noise can delay wound healing, disrupt sleep cycles, and increase the need for sedation. I remember a post-op patient I treated begging to be discharged early – even if it meant leaving without his prescriptions – just so he could get a quiet night’s sleep at home. It’s a bizarre contradiction: a place meant for healing that actively impedes it.
If we’re serious about health equity, we can’t ignore the sensory dimensions of space. Silence — or at least relief from sensory assault — shouldn’t be a luxury. It’s part of the infrastructure of wellbeing.
To design for silence is to recognise that health is not just shaped by what we eat, earn, or inherit, but by what we’re exposed to. And sound is part of that exposure, whether we pay attention to it or not.
Sound Hygiene: A Few Places to Start
You don’t need to overhaul your life or escape to a monastery to improve your relationship with sound. Just start by noticing. Sound is always on, which means it’s always shaping you. Here’s how you could start moulding the shape:
1. Curate your baseline.
Notice the ambient sound around you: appliances, traffic, voices, your own phone. What’s constant but unnoticed? Start subtracting. Switch off unnecessary noise. Consider noise-cancelling headphones (or earplugs) not for music, but for quiet.
2. Make silence intentional.
Silence isn’t just the absence of sound, it’s the presence of stillness. Set boundaries around input: no music in the morning until you’ve listened to your body, or try a daily 5-minute no-sound window.
3. Use music with intent.
Match your sound to your state, or the one you’re trying to reach. Think lo-fi for focus, ambient for decompression, rhythm for activation. Let music be a tool, not wallpaper. Explore, be playful with it and observe how your body responds.
4. Treat sound as relational.
Sing with others, go to concerts. Hum while you shower. Sound isn’t just input, it’s expression. Reclaiming it socially, even in small ways, strengthens the body’s sense of safety and belonging.
5. Advocate for better design.
Whether you work in healthcare, education, or architecture or any other sector where humans exist, bring sound into the conversation. Ask how the spaces you spend time in sound, not just how they look.
Closings Thoughts
Sound is the one sense we can’t shut off, but we can become more intentional about what we let in. And more experimental with what we create. Just as you don’t have to be a musician to use music, you don’t have to be a monk to value silence.
The question is: What are you listening to and how is it making you feel?