Listening has been a steady thread through my life, though not in a perfected, mindful sense. More often, it has been a practical way of understanding situations, environments and technologies. A life in sound doesn’t mean constant attention or heightened sensitivity. If anything, it means recognising how easily listening slips into the background, and how much it shapes things even when we’re not fully aware of it.

One of the earliest times I understood this was when my son was born. He turned his head toward our voices almost instinctively. It wasn’t sentiment; it was orientation. Even at that stage, sound was information — a guide in a new and overwhelming environment.

Years later, while working in design in Edinburgh, I went to meditation classes that treated surrounding sounds as part of the process. A radiators crack, a door shutting, the rumble of buses outside weren’t distractions but cues in the environment. On one rushed afternoon, a taxi driver who happened to be one of the meditation teachers asked if I wanted to pause and listen before getting out. Five minutes of noticing the street’s small signals was enough to reset the pace of the day. Not because I became a “better listener”, but because the soundscape shaped how my mind was operating.

What interests me now is not the idea of listening as a moral skill, but listening as a behaviour — something that happens at the intersection of perception, attention, media and environment. Modern listening habits make this even more visible. ASMR, noise apps, spatial audio, algorithmic sound design and online sound cultures all point to the fact that listening has become a tool for regulation, escape, entertainment and orientation, often simultaneously.

My background in design sits alongside all this. Years spent working on how people interact with systems taught me that sound is often the first way we register change, context or atmosphere. We react to a tone, a notification, a voice, a piece of music long before we make sense of what it means. Sound shapes behaviour without needing to declare itself.

This is why listening sits at the centre of my practice. Not as an ideal or a virtue, but as a method — a way of noticing how environments operate, how technologies intervene and how time is felt. A life in sound isn’t about perfect attention. It’s about recognising that sound is always present, always shaping experience, whether we catch it or not.