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Garret Keizer, the author of ‘The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want’, has been pondering what noise says about human relationships: who gets to make noise, who gets heard and who gets to complain about excessive noise. And also: whether the poor and powerless are exposed to more noise pollution than the wealthy.

Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen travels the world with four hydrophones, recording sounds made by underwater creatures. She then plays the sounds of, say, cod communicating with each other, to her friends before dinner. She says that some people change their mind about eating fish after they’d heard them talking to each other.

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English at Cambridge University where his research is focussed on the literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the history of sound, voice and auditory media. In ‘Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations’ he probes the fringes and limits of human language to challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to communicate and where meaning lies in language.

Steven Connor says smart phone designers should learn from modern cars which often have ‘parking aids’, sensors that emit a noise signal when you’re driving too close to an object or a person. Steven would like to include a similar ‘proxy detector’ in smartphones for all those people who walk about totally oblivious to their surroundings because they have their nose glued to their smartphone screen.