Marshall, welcome to the Get Hired Up podcast. How's your day going so far?

Marshall Jones

So far, the weather is better today than it was yesterday. Yesterday morning, uh, it was, it wasn't the kind of weather I can gloat about when you live in Southern California. You know, it was, it was pouring rain, everything that the brochure doesn't tell you. But today the sun is shining and we're back to normal. So now I can, uh, poke fun at all of my northern, cold, regional, non sunshiny...

Maureen Farmer

That would be where I am today, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is where we're recording today. And it is freezing. We have snow and, uh, drizzle and freezing rain today. So you are the envy of most of us here in the northern climbs.

Marshall Jones

Well, look, as someone from the Northeast, I have my share of...New York doesn't get, it got cold, but not as cold as other places. You know, there's something to the cold. I love the cold as an element of learning because there's nothing you can really...well, you could warm up, you can bundle up, but there's something about embracing the cold, uh, and accepting it, and the body climatizes, all these other cool things. So I just sort of enjoy the sun, but you know, throw me into a nice winter wonderland every now and again, and all of the old memories come back.

Maureen Farmer

Well, you know, what's really interesting, Marshall, I was telling a friend of mine in Australia who's actually going through incredibly intense heat, and we were comparing notes, and I said, you know, after a snowfall, there's really a hush. I don't know if you've had this experience when you were in New York, but you open the door and everything is quiet. It's like the snow insulates. And it has an acoustic effect on the world and I'm very interested in sound and how sound impacts people's emotions, their mood, very fascinated by it. And I noticed when I go into restaurants these days, for example, many of the restaurants are very minimalist, which is great. But they're very loud because there's nothing to absorb the sound in these restaurants. And I think the restaurants that do it well understand that. And I was at, had the good fortune to be at a restaurant in New York for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. And the acoustics there, Marshall, were just absolutely Luscious. They were rich. It was, it was, you could hear the people at your table speak. Uh, there was no clanging, um, and it just had such a really, really positive impact on the mood in the room.

Marshall Jones

Absolutely. It's interesting that you bring that up specifically just restaurants and environments. So, uh, I do account relations for a luxury Sonic company called Sonic Somalia. And essentially what we focus on is pairing music mindfully with the environments that we perform in. So, you know, luxury weddings, corporate events, things like that, and just the power of sound to make sure that people can enjoy music while also enjoying the company of each other. So, you know, between the musicians themselves, but also our sound engineers and also a sense of space. All of those things do contribute to an ambience and contributes to what you remember about that experience. So as you just described the restaurant you enjoyed, you know, with all of these beautiful words and tones, it's a testament to the power of that acoustic environment that you create around you. To be with others. Uh, so yeah, definitely a fascinating thing. One more thing about the snow. You know, that, that quiet, yeah, it's, it's a wonderful, you know, when the snow stays below six feet, you know, cause then it's a different kind of quiet...not being able to get out of your house.

Maureen Farmer

That's so right. Well, I'd love to tell you a little story that just came to mind, um, as you said that Fifteen years ago, I was helping to prepare for a really important dinner. And there were many public dignitaries coming to the dinner with a signed seating. Uh, it was a very important event. And I insisted that we have the best sound system available for that event. And the CFO, who was of course in charge of the budget, was giving me a hard time. And I said, Look, Glenn. This is really a non negotiable and I can guarantee you it's going to either make or break the success of this dinner. In the meantime, I had hired an event planner, a lovely woman, Jill, who became my friend. She said to me, Maureen, I wouldn't put those, that group of people together because they will talk throughout the entire dinner. And the speeches and I said, Jill, I guarantee you they won't and this is why so the dinner went off without a hitch and later on I was sitting at the table with my CEO and others on my team and this man came over to me and he was the spouse of one of the people being honored at the dinner and he said, Who was in charge of the sound and at this event, and I turned around and sheepishly said, Me. He said, well, I have been to dinners like this for the past 45 years and not once was I ever able to hear the speaker talk. He said, this was by far the best event I've ever attended like this. And then after, of course, Jill came back to me, she said, you're absolutely right. No one, no one talked during that dinner during the speeches.

So I'm really really fascinated by the topic of sound and acoustics and I heard you speak actually on a podcast and I can't remember which one it was now But I thought I have to talk to him and I'm so glad that you were able to join me today and I have probably eight or nine questions for you want to make a conversational and really help the listener here, including myself, get a sense of how we can use some of these tools to engage deeper and with more authenticity with our audience. And so having said that, Marshall, I would love to know how your career evolved and how you came to write this, this wonderful book called Tonal Influence. And we'll make sure that it's in the show notes for people to, uh, to grab. But I'd love to know how your career unfolded to where it is today.

Marshall Jones

Well, I would say it started with competitive poetry, but I guess I would go further back. So, my grandfather was an ex military veteran and he was teaching me something and I didn't realize what it was connected to as he was doing it, but I was 7 years old and he would go, he would play the music in the car and then he would just ask me to listen and pull apart all of the instruments, like what instrument was that, what instrument was that, to identify the sections of the song and the layers of it. And, you know, it wouldn't be for another I would say 25 years shortly before he died when he told me that he had taken a class called active listening while in the military. And so what he was doing, he was just teaching me what he was learning. And one that gave me an appreciation for music in a way that I didn't realize would, you know, correlate and be parallel. But one of the things that I find fascinating about songs is, you know, I can listen to a song many, many, many, many, many, many times over. And each time I'm not listening to the same song because now I'm just listening to the layers. And so the, and how the layers come together and these fascinating moments.

Fast forward to competitive poetry where your goal is to arouse people and you know you're scored from one to ten from random audience members, people you don't know, and while also competing with other people who want that same power of arousal. I found myself in that environment. I had a friend of mine who had gone to acting school and had just started and he gets on stage to compete for, um, the finals one year. And his voice has had this, uh, stentorian power in it. And I said, uh, you know, I knew he was going to win because not only was he a great poet, his words were fantastic, but in addition, there was this sonic quality. So I asked him, I'm saying, yo. So what's going on? Cause I also knew him and I knew he didn't sound like that before, just a few months prior, they said, you know, I'm in acting school. And the very first thing that they train is the voice because the voice is life. I've spent the last 13 years, 14 years. Chasing the germ of, of that thought, the life. So, you know, it began first with, I'm going to work on my own voice. And, uh, I had times when I was trying to sound like everything was a play. Hi, my name is Marshall. And, uh, that was very, um, disconcerting for a lot of people around me. But eventually, you know, you start to read books like, uh, Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristen Linklater. You start to, you know, you start to speak with distinction because it's the actor's book, but then you go to Freeing the Natural Voice...Set Your Voice Free by Roger Love. Uh, you know, you read all these other books and it became less about the performance of the voice, but also it became about the development of the psyche through the voice. So one of the things that Kristen Lienglater says that struck me in the beginning of her book...she goes, you know, when we are young, every vocalization is a full bodied vocalization, you know, the cries, the reaching, you know, we're encouraged, which is actually a funny thing because when we're learning to talk our parents, they want to hear us say words and so they encourage us to do all of the sounds and make all of the noises with no inhibition.

And then we get words and we want something like a chocolate chip cookie. You are told, well, wait, wait, how do you ask? And you go, please, pretty, please, can I have a chocolate chip cookie? But what happens is you learn that this is the way to get what you want, right? Completely disconnected from the body. And that was what led me to really explore that much deeper. So, MindBodySpirit is the company that I created to explore this with other people and give them this access, uh, because of that line of thinking, like, here's the mind, here's the body, here's how we speak, and when we connect these two, we can bring them together.

The jolt came with...I was invited to a school district. I was experiencing a massive amount of teenage suicide, uh, and they were doing it in a, uh, in a very violent way. So they were going to the schools. Each respective school, one more than the other. And then they would just jump in front of the train on the school grounds. Like, it's just a very strange phenomenon. So, I was invited to, you know, you get invited to put your two cents into, you know, at the time I was doing narrative restructuring through poetry. So helping people to take the things that they feel, turn them into beautiful words and, you know, change the alchemy of it. And so they invited me to do that.

And, uh, I go to one school on Friday and then I get an email Sunday that a student from the other school had jumped Saturday night. So I'm scheduled to go Monday morning and you know, you're at the airport, you're, you're thinking to yourself. No one's going to care about any narrative, anything, any poetry, anything. So I type in the ear and the voice in that order, and a book comes up in Google Play by Alfred Tomatis with that title. And I download this book, you know, you start to read it with such fervor, you've spending much more time speaking much like I'm doing now.

Maureen Farmer

So was this, was this recent, Marshall, this phenomenon?

Marshall Jones

That was, that phenomenon was around 2015. And it shifted more of the value of what was going on. Like it was, you know, you do the art and you know, people have their feelings about art and you know, while concurrently researching this instrument that we use every day to throw words around all the time. And, you know, we pay attention to the actors and the singers and so on and so on, or, you know, political leaders, people who are given a microphone and a platform, everyone is using this. And so the two way street of it became clear, not just the speaking part, but the listening part. Cause we were in the classroom and, uh, I remember, I mean, this girl was sitting 45 degrees to my left. It was another young lady across from her. And somehow we sang Hakuna Matata in this class. And this young lady face plants and just bursts out crying and the girl across from her looks at me looks at her and then kind of gestures outside the classroom that they had us in which was right next to the train tracks I think that was very poor judgment on the class choice part, but that young lady had just lost her friend. And we put our hands on her shoulder and just stood there and it was at that moment, it was a moment of recognition that, um, speaking isn't always talking and what does that mean now?

So, yeah, I mean, you know, these things line up and then you go to bars, you break up fights, you do kind of stuff like that. And the next thing you know, you're working with law enforcement, et cetera, et cetera. And then the corporate stuff becomes easier to talk about because, you know, you deal with the law enforcement. It's, you know, the humdrum of it all, you know, but, uh, the trajectory has continuously been this pursuit of the voice. The voice is life.

Maureen Farmer

You mentioned a book and I cut you off. Did you want to elaborate on that?

Marshall Jones

Yeah. Alfred Tomatis talked about, and he won a Nobel prize for his work. It was funny, he was an ENT, his father was an opera singer and he decided, he's like, I could sing. He's like, or I could become an ENT and then have clients because all of my father's friends need to come to me. He chose the savvy business route. And, um, you know, he came to the conclusion that we are a listening species. I don't think it's uniquely human, but our capacity to listen is a different kind and it's what gives us our different intellectual capacities and faculties and repairing and restoring our ears. It was paramount, but it just shifted this idea from having a speaking voice to a listening voice.

Maureen Farmer

I mentioned earlier that I'm really interested in sound and, and that type of thing. And one of the things I know from my childhood, I. was very attuned to my mother's moods. And your book, Tonal Influence grabbed me because I could always tell what kind of a day it was going to be or what kind of a day it had been with my mom just by the tone of her voice. And I know that's not unique to me, but it always struck me. I just knew even when others couldn't Discern. I knew when, you know, it was going to be a bad day at home. Not  that it was always bad at home, but I, I knew, uh, just by the sound, just by that sound. In her voice, uh, and it always, it stayed with me and it, it, it almost, if I think of it from a, a protective point of view, not that I needed to protect myself from her, but just the tone can communicate whether you're in danger.

Marshall Jones

Oh, absolutely. You know. Yeah, there's, um, sirens, things that are meant to get your attention that, you know, around like 3, 000 Hertz is the sound of the human scream and the sound of a baby crying. And it is the frequency where the ear is the least immune to penetration. So you're going to hear those sounds. A baby starts crying, you're gonna hear that. You're gonna hear, uh, human screams. Also going to hear that. And so when there are people, uh, that are speaking within certain ranges, even if it's not as exciting, it's like, can I have a latte? And you're like, where's the fire, you know, what's the problem? You know, uh, and people have those qualities in their voice and they don't know. So they can't hear themselves. So, you know, we just work that out.

Maureen Farmer

We work with a lot of people who are communicating outwardly into the marketplace. They're negotiating, they're pitching to investors or pitching to someone, board interviews, negotiations, and things like that. Do you help clients with that type of activity? Preparing?

Marshall Jones

Yeah. Preparing. Just doing a lot of deep listening, uh, and also giving people perspective of others. You know, the humans or any organism, I think that, you know, we overemphasize human need, but most mammals behave the same way. So there's, you know, a sense of hierarchy sense of, you know, the difference between personal power and social power, you know, these kinds of things. And so, uh, you know, helping people with their words, helping people with the way that they deliver those words and then helping people with what happens when neither of those are working.

Maureen Farmer

Can you go back for just a moment, Marshall, and explain the difference between, did you say personal power and social power?

Marshall Jones

So there was a, you know, you read so many books and then you start to forget where, but it was somewhere in a book. The examination was. I think it was like chimpanzees and they, they just said, okay, there's two kinds of power here.

So personal power is the ruthless pursuit of power at any, at all costs, no matter who you destroy along the way. And then social power is exactly what it sounds like. It is power that is given to you by the social community you are a part of and they are willing to do it. And the comparison in the story was.

When this particular chimp, the personal power pursuer, once it got too old to defend its territory and to defend its power, the community killed him. And once the social power chimp got old, the community took care of him. And you see this trope everywhere. I mean, it's like, it's such a simple binary. Like you see like the person who like pursued whatever you look at um, like if we were to take The Lion King, for example, Scar, uh, went, went after personal power and, you know, he got it by killing Mufasa.

So, you know, you move the big cheese out the way. Now you're the big cheese. And, you know, the. Everybody is now under Scar's rule, you know, Simba has a little growing up to do to reclaim the kingdom. Now, it's not the fight with Simba that ends it all actually, it's the hyenas. Who used to be the underlings and now see scar weakened and they go for it.

And, you know, you know, the rest is history. That's a perfect example, uh, you know, of the pursuit of personal power. Simba was tasked to run the kingdom. It wasn't about. personal power, like the metaphor, the story, you know, Mufasa, he talked about the circle of life and, you know, then we die, become the grass, the antelope, eat the grass.

There was a certain interconnectedness to everything that was, um, implicit. In that storytelling that he was giving his son and scar. On the other hand, he wasn't thinking about the circle of life. He was thinking about himself and see that play out. And it doesn't mean that people who pursue personal power don't get it.

Like you have history history has is wrought with those pursuits and successful campaigns. It is just. An option. Uh, and you can choose, but each one of them has their own roadmaps, consequences of failure. And I think that, uh, you know, in the corporate world, you'll see it, you know, ruthlessness. Um, but then you'll see now with social media.

Social power is so much more rampant because you can very, you can very quickly be socially ostracized for the mistreatment of someone or the treatment of someone. And, uh, you know, a CEO or a manager or whatever, you know, can lose their jobs. I remember looking at the stock market. Uh, I was worked on wall street for a little bit and found out like, Oh wow.

You go, the news drives prices. It blew my mind. It was like, wait, something happens in the world on the news. And then if you just happen to have something that's, you know, a part of that story, it's like, well, here's the stock price, or it can go up or it can go down based on the social perception of. An item that doesn't really change with people.