Intentional | Audio Identity Blog

> > Listen to the podcast now. (MP3, 22 minutes)

We’re finally pulling things together for our first podcast. This will happen weekly, at least on a trial basis. Our topics, of course, are sound, identity, design and brands.

What’s the role of sound in creating impressions, orchestrating experiences, and engineering perceptions? Where does sound fit in the larger design and branding world? Who’s using audio to affect change in interesting ways?

This initial podcast is the first of a multi-part conversation I recently had Martyn Ware of The Human League, Heaven 17, Illustrious, Sonic ID and more. In this conversation we’ll hear about some of Martyn’s recent work and his use of three-dimensional sound to impact perceptions and behaviors.

For what it’s worth: this is a prototype effort…no fancy sound effects or background music. I’ve recorded the call in Skype. It’s just 20 minutes simple conversation; the value’s in the content. If you like it, come back next week. If you have comments or suggestions, much appreciated.

> > Listen to the podcast now. (MP3, 22 minutes)

Enjoy.

– Noel Franus

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Taking a brief departure from the land of identity to stray a tad off-topic…

Shh! Said the Billboard

Really like the decibel-o-meter that’s part of the latest AEG Electrolux campaign. You drive by and a sound-sensing billboard (supposedly) measures the current decibel levels on the street. All in an effort to remind you exactly how silent their vacuum cleaners are. As Marcel at The Amber Theatre points out, it’s brilliant because it’s a show-don’t-tell idea that inherently communicates.

Conducting computers in real-time

Ge Wang conducts the Stanford Laptop Orchestra. 20 laptops, six channels each for a total of 120 channels of sound…with fully live performances. Nifty. Here’s a tee-vee news piece on the group.

Yes We Can! Answer! The! Phone! 

And finally, just when you thought your Friday couldn’t get any possibly giddier, along comes Slate and their fresh batch of political ringtones featuring Hillary, Obama and McCain. Sure, this is tongue-in-cheek, but I see this as a great new tool in the war on terrorism; endless exposure to that “Hillary cackle” ringtone is guaranteed to make any terrorist wilt. (Quick! Free cellphones for the Taliban! Hehehe.)

Happy weekend.

– Noel Franus 

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Photo by chuckp

If you’ve visited New Orleans, you know it doesn’t take too much wandering around to soak in the city’s sonic identity. It’s not something you can encapsulate in the form of a five-second audio logo, or even in one particular song or style of music for that matter.

I was fortunate enough to live there for a few years in the early 90’s. My head overflows with audio postcards when I drift back. Funky brass bands. Dixieland jazz. Funky blues. Cajun, zydeco, boogie-woogie piano, you get the picture.

You’ll hear all this walking the city in one day, but you’ll also likely take in the audio apparition of tankers and barges heading down the Mississippi just over the levee. Or the constant grind of streetcars, which can be felt in living rooms that are blocks away. Then there’s the rooster-hour hose-down of the Quarter’s streets, followed by a chorus of shopkeepers’ brooms as the city’s washed anew for just one more day. It’s a sonic collage that you’ll experience nowhere else on earth.

If you’re a fan of American music, you have this city to thank for sparking so much of the music we love today — New Orleans is the Giving Tree to which Rock often returns. And yet there’s more than music…that urban soundscape…that creates and reinforces our perceptions of a place most unique.

– Noel Franus

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You may have noticed that the logo over there on the right side of the page is different. As of this spring I’m no longer with Elias Arts — I’ve teamed up with Martyn Ware and Dan Kirby of Sonic ID.

Life at Elias was outstanding—both the process and the people. Together we took giant steps in bolstering the strategic side of sonic branding and identity. Rayan, Fritz and Susan were especially stellar teammates in our regular efforts to push, twist, squeeze and pull the boundaries of brand-based sound, and in creating new sources of value for our clients. Many thanks, friends, for allowing me into your lives…I’ll see you in New York.

Sonic ID is my next adventure. I’m thrilled to join Martyn and Dan, who have been devising jaw-dropping work for BP, HSBC and AT&T (acronyms aplenty) out of the London office since 2004. We’re taking our collective branding / strategy / experience-design / composition / sound-design / and-yes-pop-star smarts and using them to grow Sonic ID in both North America and Europe.

The official pitch: Sonic ID offers strategic planning and creative development for global brands. We assist clients in identifying their opportunities with sonic branding, and we create sonic identity systems that unify a brand’s experience across its mediascape.

The parenthetical pitch: this is new territory for most companies, so I’ll unofficially recommend three relatively painless points of entry for curious organizations: 1) sonic experience auditing; 2) brand ideation and concepting; and 3) three-dimensional soundscape creation for retail, corporate, institutional and public spaces, events and experiences. Contact me if you’d like to learn more.

And on that note I’ll wrap it up.. Coming soon: a podcast interview with Martyn Ware. Our topic: sound design as a tool for change. Very interesting stuff, stay tuned.

– Noel Franus

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News flash: fellow Sonic ID compadre Martyn Ware and I will be speaking at Syngery, the Design Management Institute’s Brand/Design 20 Conference. Dates: June 11-13, 2008 in Cincinnati. Topic: Demystifying Sonic Branding and Identity. We’re grateful for the opportunity, and given the line-up — with leaders from Marriott, Starbucks, Kodak, etc. on board — we can’t wait to attend. Looking forward to seeing you there.

– Noel Franus

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The world’s atwitter over Muxtape. My friends at Mule and Substance suggest it’s the next sliced bread, but I’m still kicking the tires waiting to be really wowed. (Update: wow factor increases with use.) Nonetheless, your humble DJ Franux has given it hist best global-blues-funkytown mix — check it out or give it a spin and make your own. Happy Friday.

– Noel Franus

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Photo by Libertinus

One of the areas most ripe for sonic branding/audio identity — or in this particular case I’ll call it holistic sound design — is healthcare. There’s not enough of it being done today.

Why? You and I are probably quite familiar with the idea that every little interaction, especially when well choreographed, can make or break the “customer experience” in a hospital. Eventually happy people become healthy people, who need less time in the hospital, and you know that’s music to everyone’s ears: patients, doctors, healthcare companies, insurance firms, governments.

What’s this have to do with intentionally applied sound? Let me state the obvious: just as visuals can impact perceptions and behaviors, so can sound…in sometimes more profound ways.

I should back up for a moment to make sure you know I’m not talking about traditional music therapy. This isn’t about one violin in a corner of the room a couple times a week (though that’s a start). It’s about thinking of the collective relationship we have with sound in the healthcare experience.

Quoting George Van Antwerp at the Patient Advocate site: One of the more interesting experiments I saw in architecture school was where some students set up a display where different areas of the building had color and sound that where activated by motion. The smiles and reactions from people were interesting. But, how often are we sitting down and mapping out the process and experience of the patient from open enrollment through different scenarios?

Sitting down and mapping out the process and experience…that’s the difference between making noise and making things better. When you orchestrate customer experiences that are both empathic and systemic — as IDEO, for example, has done time and again — you’re adding measurable value. And design is no longer a matter of output, but one of process.

Sound seldom plays an intentional role in the customer experience, mostly for three reasons: 1) “sonic branding” is usually mistaken for a cheap marketing gimmick (just add music!); 2) “sound design” is often seen as an artist’s toy rather than a business tool; and 3) people don’t usually change what they can’t see.

It’s time to approach the problem a little differently, with greater emphasis on all our sensory stimuli. We know that sound plays a huge role in how we perceive and experience spaces. We know that sound, as with other stimuli, can impact us physically and physiologically for the better. And a good many of us (ahem) have the customer-experience chops to pull it together in the form of an experiential playbook for healthcare scenarios.

To take Van Antwerp’s example further, this could mean a more pleasant door-opening; generative sounds for specific zones, times of day, or seasons; intentionally directed silence (especially in those blasted recovery rooms); and other acoustic considerations.

That’s a start. There’s much more to consider if you have the time to pour some energy into it. But it involves a much broader view of sonic branding than the Intel or Yahoo sonic logo. After all, brands sound like their bottom-line products and real-world experiences. Not just their ads.

And on that note…my partners and I at Sonic ID are working on a fascinating batch of closely related experiential projects for commercial applications. I can’t wait to tell you more. Stay tuned…

– Noel Franus

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The Singing Revolution looks like a hit — this is the story of 30,000 Estonians who quite literally sang their way to freedom. Matt Zoller Seitz of the The New York Times sums it up best:

“Imagine the scene in ‘Casablanca’ in which the French patrons sing ‘La Marseillaise’ in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of ‘The Singing Revolution’.”

Coming soon to a theater near you…

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I’ve written another sonic branding / audio identity feature for the AIGA: “Sound Value: Creating an Audio Identity for Cisco.” It’s a case study, so there’s a bit more meat in it than some of the introductory pieces I’ve offered in the past.

I’m excited. As part of the vendor team, it’s clear to me that Cisco has some tremendous opportunities to leverage sound in ways that few companies can.

The creation of a systemic plan that accommodates Cisco and its wide brand portfolio — including Linksys, WebEx, Scientific Atlanta — means Cisco understands their opportunity isn’t to thoughtlessly infest our world with sonic logos, noisy ads and cute ringtones, but to increase brand linkage and emotional depth across these touchpoints in ways that visuals cannot or do not.

Looking forward to hearing this evolve.

– Noel Franus

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Motorola seeks a haptics expert — someone skilled in sound and touch interfaces — to work on digital devices. Broad visibility, interesting problems, bright people. More in this PDF. Know anyone? Contact Elisa Vargas, Consumer eXperience Design, Product Centric User Interface Manager at Motorola: elisa dot vargas at motorola dot com.

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Following up from my previous post “Secondary Players in Our Environmental Soundscape” … Grant McCracken has a terrific piece at his website and at the AIGA on the simple beauty of found sounds.

Preview: “The charm of found sounds is that they are not designed. They just happen. Not one thought to make them. No one was trying to anticipate what a middle age anthropologist wants to hear from his Coke machine, dish washer or ThinkPad. And this is charming because these objects become a kind of whiteboard. I don’t have to shift anyone’s meanings to attach my own.”

McCracken continues: “no meanings are always better than moronic ones.” It’s a very well written piece.

I’ve always been a proponent of context sensitivity rather than noise for the sake of noise, or sound for the forced, pushed sense of meaning. (Exhibit Brand A: can’t you hear us? We matter, dammit!) It’s refreshing to find an essay that so thoughtfully uncovers this important point…some things are just better left alone.

– Noel Franus

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Photo by CoffeeGeek

Thinking this morning about sound and cognition in physical spaces. Yes, countless studies on sound and purchase behavior in retail environments await the curious, but let’s toss all that aside for a moment.

What’s on my mind today isn’t commerce per se, but the impact of the secondary players in our audioscape. In other words, this isn’t about the background music in a busy coffeeshop (which is unfortunately what conversations on sound in physical environments is often limited to) but the specific din of the La Marzocco humming away industriously, the chatter among patrons, the cha-ching of the cash register and the impact of these on our perceptions.

Can you imagine, for instance, how you might think differently about that coffeeshop if it took away its hardworking espresso machine out of sight or somewhere less audible? Might as well be an antiques shop, a church hall or a used books store in that case. Things go awry when our audio cues don’t match expectations. And this forces other environmental cues to work that much harder to achieve the notion of perceptive “fit” and appropriateness.

Envision a visit to New Orleans without the calliope pipes chirping away on the riverside (no thanks). A waltz through Manhattan without audible traffic (thumbs up). Or a visit to the dentist without those imposing teeth-grinding machines (way up). While these aren’t signature sounds, they’re experiential ingredients that for better or worse are part of our world. And some of them are things we can actually control.

Today (at least) I’m not alone in this meandering. Came across this New York Times piece on the role of phone conversations in a busy office: The Office Phone Call Was Music to Their Ears (registration required). In short: a busy office just doesn’t feel very busy or dynamic without all that sonic energy in the air. (Blame email and take-the-call-anywhere cell phones.)

You know where I’m headed. Today’s closing question can’t be anything other than: what primary and secondary sounds add to or detract from the places and spaces you interact with today? How? Why? What if our typical, expected sounds were subverted in some way to sound like things they’re not?

One more for you branding nuts: how are your customer’s real-world experiences working for or against intended brand perceptions? And which among those can be intentionally designed? For example, I’ll riff on the dentist-drill example; dentists work feverishly to produce a calming environment, get you relaxed, keep you happy. But then halfway through the visit that noisy beast inevitably rears its ugly head. Using a softer, gentler tool would be one step in the right direction.

Granted, it’s a small step, but those little things can add up. Together, they comprise this thing we call an “experience.” And as any of us interested in directing, producing or creating experiences knows, sometimes those little things matter.

Related reading: The Soundscape; Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World by R. Murray Schafer. Enjoy.

Update: should you happen to find yourself in Belgium, check out Displaced Sounds in Leuven this Thursday March 13: “Expect unexpected sounds, exciting evenings where listening and hearing are the keywords.” More.

– Noel Franus

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Continuing in the spirit of keeping it light this week, I’m obligated to point you to the Song Chart Meme photo pool over at flickr.

Now you finally know how Michael Jackson and Prince begin their songwriting process…

Happy weekend,

NF

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Grandma gave our daughter a Hanna Montana musical greeting card for Valentine’s Day. You don’t know “earworm” till you’ve been through this. (I curse you little Hannah girl and the Hallmark house you live in.)

The Gap’s Sound of Color project has assigned five bands/musicians a color. They make music to reflect that color. Novel, though perhaps not as intriguing as Concrete’s Color of My Sound, an online experiment in collaborative synesthesia.

I’ve recently been asked to provide examples of well-executed sonic branding for article. As you can imagine, I have my criteria and my answer — and if you comb through this site it’s easy enough to read my mind — but I’m curious about you: how do you define effective sonic branding? Let me know…we may see a longer post devoted to this topic in the near future.

And finally: I can’t stand jingles. But this mash-up from The Office and YouTube is too good to pass up; “Andy,” an office worker, is stumped on the final line of a catchy candy catch-phrase. One brave internet soul had a little fun with it — click video for more.

Enjoy the weekend.

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Roger Dooley has an interesting piece on music and neuromarketing over at FutureLab. He touches on non-music aspects of audio branding, which is somewhat divergent from and certainly more valuable than a traditional, cursory piece on audio branding. Dooley specifically calls out Nokia:

They have always offered a unique walkie-talkie feature which lets fellow Nextel users initiate a conversation instantly by pushing one button. While most cell features let the user choose from a range of sounds or ringtones, Nextel did something smart: every Nextel phone emits a distinctive chirp when in walkie-talkie mode. This chirp is unique and instantly recognizable by any other Nextel user. They have incorporated the chirp into their TV commercials, and one hears it often in public. This powerful auditory branding message cost Nextel nothing other than the courage to keep the sound consistent across phone styles and generations, and to not let users easily change it.

Russell Davies has a jaw-droppingly thorough play-by-play and heady commentary on the new Sound Art book by by Alan Licht. Here’s a snip from the book, called out on Davies’ site:

Morton Feldman, after a discussion with Brian O’Doherty concluded: “…Between categories is a defining characteristic of sound art, its creators historically coming to the form from different disciplines and often continuing to work in music and/or different media. But in the last decade sound art’s identity between categories has intensified, particularly as the term itself has spread. Eno’s ideal sound installation is ‘a place poised between a club, a gallery, a church, a square, and a park, and sharing aspects of all of these.’ “

Conference watch (revised): speaking of design “between categories,” one of the more intriguing new conferences on my horizon has to be 5D: The Future of Immersive Design, this October at Cal State, Long Beach. (Originally scheduled for April.)

From the agenda: “This international conference assembles the design world’s leading pioneers and academics in an open exchange of ideas and insights about new design processes and the delivery of the immersive experience.”

If the topics of “narrating space,” “gestural interfaces for cinema,” or “the future of sound” don’t pique your interest, then perhaps we should talk. Do we even know each other anymore?

Finally, since we’re on the topic of conferences, I’m planning some travel for 2008 and am curious: which single business, design or media conference is your must-attend event for 2008? Why?

Give your answer here (at LinkedIn) or in the comments field below. Thanks.

– Noel Franus

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It’s a new year in a nascent industry — no better time to address the opportunities and challenges we face as an industry in the coming year. That’s what I’m exploring in this piece. Note that these are, naturally, my opinions only. I speak for no one else. These ramblings may, in fact, be simple projections of what I want rather than what I expect. If you think so, call me on it. And by all means join the party by adding your own predictions to the forecast.

Put the needle on the record:

Ask around: what exactly is audio branding? Audio identity? Sonic branding? Sonic identity? Visit the websites for ten different firms and get ten different answers. This gumbo of offerings slows industry growth and dampens the market; prospective clients don’t buy products or services they can’t understand, and a fuzzy value proposition equates to longer lead times. Nobody wants that.

Brand consultancies, sound-design production houses and equipment resellers offer very different services, and shouldn’t be mistaken for one another. Online, however, it’s difficult to tell the difference between these three — or any huckster with a copy of Garage Band and a website, for that matter. Future clients who are researching this field shouldn’t have to sort it out. That’s up to us.

What’ll it take to grow a shared understanding of our practice? A common language. Best practices. Case studies. Measurement. ROI. It’ll be messy, but it all starts with conversation and community. This year we will see a lot more of that — both in face-to-face forums and online.

No doubt about it, this is a highly creative field. But to ignore or downplay the business case for sonic branding is to miss the full equation. Brand-based audio assets are financial assets that grow in value — especially when deployed as part of a sonic identity system that allows multiple touchpoints to reinforce one another. They create economies of scale. And they build recognition, awareness and preference of and for a brand, which translates to monetary value.

That’s just the short list. It’s up to us to continuously position the benefits of audio identity and sonic branding on financial terms. Service providers who speak the language of business will move this industry forward.

Doesn’t it seem that today most common issue regarding audio and interactive media is limited to the question of “shouldn’t your have audio on your website?” Ack. There is no didactic, prescriptive answer, is there? And more importantly, doesn’t this miss the bigger questions of: 1) would/could/should/how can audio augment the user experience?; and 2) how can it link to or reinforce other brand initiatives — how can it work harder for the brand?

The digital marketplace is huge — and still growing. There’s a lot more to digital media strategy than just asking just a few pedestrian questions. Those who understand the right questions are more likely to become a client’s strategic partner rather than a mere provider of content.

Have you noticed an uptick in the conversation — at least online in the last six months — about the role of sound at the product level? Methinks this is bound to continue gathering steam, and my expectation is that the buzz will expand beyond traditional “sound UI” and sound design for products.

Retail environments, public places and physical spaces are becoming increasingly more important in the relationship between people and brands. The high-value opportunity for audio/sonic branding firms isn’t in providing just bleeps, blips and soundtracks for these experiences (late in the creative process) but in the broader consultative role of experience designer, director, producer, and curator for brand-based, audio-intensive experiences. We will see Design Thinking (yes, with a capital D and T) move to the forefront in 2008.

What happened when the studio musician, the sonar expert and the ethnomusicologist walked into a bar? We have no idea. It’s never happened, but you can bet the conversation would be an ear-opener. This lack of collaboration is unfortunate given that most other design disciplines have found a way to work across typical boundaries to create create compelling products and in fact address some of humanity’s grander challenges.

Take, for example, the Hippo Water Roller or Design for Democracy. These innovative efforts came about via collaborations among industrial designers, architects, design researchers, visual designers, and so on. This is very much the IDEO or Archeworks model: pick a problem, throw a variety of skills into the mix, and see what happens.

Today, though, most sound-based specialties generally live in isolation of one another. And rarely do they work in meaningful, game-changing ways with other design disciplines to address social concerns.

This, too, will change in 2008. I’m not sure if this will be a competition, an event, or some other forum. But I am sure that we have a lot to learn from one another, and that we’ll all be much better off leveraging each others’ strengths — people in need benefit from the solutions derived from such work, and down the road, brands benefit from the innovation process that ensues.

There you have it for the future of audio identity in 2008. At least in one man’s eyes and ears. Now let’s see what’s buzzing in your brain…comments, ideas, and constructive feedback encouraged. I’m all ears.

– Noel Franus

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Happy new year! This past year has been a remarkable 365 days for those of us in the business of audio branding, sonic branding and audio identity. In 2007, colleagues and clients alike have fortunately expressed expectations well beyond the level of novelty…interest and money isn’t going into audio branding because it’s cool or new. It’s going into audio branding because sound is increasingly understood as a valuable tool for communicating a brand and its intentions.

Why? As you know, things are changing. Where, how and what brands communicate is something we all thought we’ve had figured out for the last sixty-plus years (it’s in advertising and on the sales floor, right?) but now that our world has become increasingly fragmented and our media ever more one-to-one, all we know for sure is that nothing’s for sure. People don’t watch as much TV as they used to. Product experiences drive perceptions. Personal, mobile media is both the present and the future, yet most of us barely even know what that means, really.

Brands that must stay front of mind understand that having a well-constructed audio brand strategy provides a comprehensive, cover-your-bets approach to future brand identification and communication. Some of the reasons why are probably familiar to you by now: music, sound, voice and silence can alter behaviors in ways that nothing else can; sound communicates when and where visuals can’t; unique, proprietary sounds are unforgettable (in ways we can’t escape, like it or not); and music is an ideal vehicle for audience/customer engagement and collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, music can communicate in mere moments what words, images and visuals often take minutes or longer to achieve.

The list of benefits goes on, but the takeaway is simple: the delivery and consumption of media will always be in flux. And brand-savvy companies looking to create meaning amidst the cacaphony must leverage every tool in their toolbox for doing so.

I’m thrilled to have worked, in 2007, with brands that get this. It’s not even that they’re the most innovative among peer brands (though, of course, they are ;-); it’s that they have their act together well enough to see the future, understand it somewhat, and plan for it now. Those that can’t or don’t do the same will be left scrambling. (I don’t quite know, yet, what the sound of scrambling is, but I can assure you that it’s not pleasant.)

So there you have it, a last post and the end of the year. If audio branding is your business, too, then I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well. No doubt you’re excited about the new year and beyond.

A new year which, by the way, will kick off with a five-things-to-watch-for-in-2008 piece here at this site. I’ll follow that up in mid-January with the second of a two-part article series at the AIGA Gain website. (The first, Building Brand Value Through the Strategic Use of Sound, provided an introductory overview of audio branding and identity; this upcoming second piece is a real-world, client case-study for a brand we know and love.) All of which will be followed by yet more surprises.

So stay tuned. Get in touch (noel at intentional audio dot com). And keep in touch. Here’s to more good things to come in 2008.

– Noel Franus

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Photo by Joachim S Müller

Shining a little sonic spotlight on a new organization: Ear to the Earth, a group whose aims go well beyond art for art’s sake — they have a problem to solve, and it’s a big one.

Ear to the Earth is an organization that aims to engage the public in environmental issues through environmental sound and sound art. It’s a new idea. And it’s an important idea. Listening can get people involved. Listening is close and personal. And we believe that by connecting people with the sounds of the world, we can involve people in what’s happening to the world.

Multimedia bonus from their website: Bernie Krause, one of the leading researchers on the “noises of nature” provides a sonic peek at the sounds of a jaguar in the wild, practically sitting atop Krause’s microphones. Grab your great speakers or headphones and turn it up:

Stunning, beautiful, haunting, superlative. Awareness-raising, for sure.

– Noel Franus

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Heading into a long holiday weekend, the commerce amps up and the opportunities to step back and reflect on things that matter become increasingly rare. Steve Duin sets a useful tone for the break in this very readworthy column.

Snip:

…When it comes to the full-court press of the Nordstrom clerks, the metallic howl of the Salvation Army bells, or the tone-deaf quarrel between the ordinary and the uninspired, I am in full retreat.

Maybe it’s a matter of balance. While there’s more resonance in giving than getting at this time of year, the darkest and shortest of days, we all know we’re at the receiving end of something simple and profound. And we are waiting — and listening — for the quiet reminder of what rests at the heart of the reunion.

– Noel Franus

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