‘Ear-marvellous’: how to enjoy the music and sounds of the world that surrounds us

A fuller appreciation of the sounds that surround us can transform your life

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that life without music would be a mistake. I agree, but I'd expand the frame to include a wide variety of other human and non-human sounds. For me, the world is often auraculous or ear-marvellous" - full of noises, which, to cite Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, give delight and hurt not".

Among my earliest memories as a small child is the sound, on a summer evening, of a peal of church bells echoing off the hillsides around the village in Hampshire where my grandparents lived. Over the years since then I have been intrigued by sounds of almost every kind - though I do exclude a few, such as some of those in the genre of music known as noise", which a friend says he finds soothing, but which I find about as welcome as putting my head in a buzzsaw.