This week’s ABR Podcast is a commentary from writer and psychologist Debi Hamilton on the world’s growing addiction to background noise. With sound in increasing volumes filling ever more space – from taxis to restaurants, gyms to shops – what does it function to do, psychologically and socially? And what does quietness and even silence now represent within these spaces? Debi Hamilton was the joint winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014. Her second poetry collection, The Sly Night Creatures of Desire, was published in 2016. Here is Debi Hamilton with ‘The Tyranny of Sound’, published in the April issue of ABR.