Intentional | Audio Identity Blog

I’m currently deep-diving on the subject of music and mood, and came across this over at PsyBlog—a recent study detailing the seven most common ways that music influences mood:

1. Entertainment - the most fundamental level music provides stimulation. It lifts the mood before going out, it passes the time while doing the washing up, it accompanies travelling, reading and surfing the web.
2. Revival - Music revitalises in the morning and calms in the evening.
3. Strong sensation - Music can provide deep, thrilling emotional experiences, particularly while performing.
4. Diversion - Music distracts the mind from unpleasant thoughts which can easily fill the silence.
5. Discharge - Music matching deep moods can release emotions: purging and cleansing.
6. Mental work - Music encourages daydreaming, sliding into old memories, exploring the past.
7. Solace - Shared emotion, shared experience, a connection to someone lost.

While there are countless studies on the role of music and sound influencing mood, I thought this was an easy, usable overview of the role of music in our lives. Fine and dandy, but what really got my attention was the discussion of music playing a role in helping us better process our own lives:

Many of Saarikallio and Erkkila’s findings chime with previous research. For example, distraction is considered one of the most effective strategies for regulating mood. Music has also been strongly connected with reflective states. These tend to allow us greater understanding of our emotions.

One of the few negative connections Saarikallio and Erkkila consider is that sad music might promote rumination. Rumination is the constant examination of emotional state which, ironically, can lead to less clarity. On the contrary, however, Saarikallio and Erkkila found that music increased the understanding of feelings, an effect not associated with rumination.

Now. Just for shits and giggles, let’s step back and consider the massive testing lab that is your company’s call center or your business’s retail store. Zillions of people calling, visiting you, ready to buy, and zillions of them impacted by music in the ways described above.

It’s not quite as simple as Pavlov’s dog, but clearly there’s a cause-and-effect relationship at work. Let’s hope the CMOs and COOs — the primary decision-makers in these scenarios — have enough good sense to understand that.

I’ve written a new piece for Gain: the AIGA Journal of Business and Design: “Building Brand Value Through the Strategic Use of Sound.”

Sneak preview: “Audio identity takes into account the totality of a company’s sounds—from the promotional to the functional—and offers a systemic (rather than subjective) approach that ensures brands are perceived the way companies intend them to be perceived.”

It’s a printable, five-minute overview of audio branding, intended for experience designers, design managers and brand brains. (And never before have my words been part of such an elegant design.) Useful, yes? No? Feel free to speak up, people of the Internet.

Friday fun: Make the Logo Bigger. (MP3)

Sometimes you gotta shake it up and throw them sketches up on the wall to see what sticks. In the interest of full-throttle transparency and in hopes of kickstarting a useful chat on audio branding, I’ve created a quick-and-ready model for the audio-identity experience.

(Click for a larger version)

It’s an incomplete start. And I’m borrowing heavily from Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience diagram, which caught fire in the user-experience world a few years back. But JJG’s diagram provides an appropriate launching pad for understanding the nuts and bolts of any intentional experience, sonic identities included.

It’s one thing to launch an audio logo that sticks in peoples’ minds. It’s another to extend a brand strategy into contextually relevant ways for the humans who interact with brands across a myriad of touchpoints. An audio identity works much harder for a brand than a simple logo; here’s my attempt at illustrating how.

Very rough thinking at this point, so your feedback is appreciated. (And if this is completely foreign to you, here’s a digestible intro to audio branding that you may find useful. Happy clicking.)

Time for me to stop collecting links and start sharing.

Listeningtowords.com allows you to search for or browse lectures online. Educational, TED, PopTech, whatever…

Perfect for drivetime. Me, I’ve already found a batch of promising lectures by Daniel Barenboim: “In the beginning was sound,” “The Neglected Sense,” The Power of Music” and so on:

10 minutes into the first Barenboim lecture I’m cued in on the relationship between sound and silence. “With silence, notes die. And this is the beginning of the tragic element in music.”

Looking forward to watching this service grow.

…and here’s what he thinks about fixing it.

“Consumers are living in multiple modes, and they have many different personas. In the course of the day one consumer could be in four or five different market segments. This just builds complexity into the whole notion of what it means to market and to engage the consumer with a meaningful experience…

The opportunity is to create a model that ties together the deep ethnographic understanding of the user, the system engineering understanding, and the brand/marketing understanding. Tying these three things together is quite powerful.”

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After reading this, I can’t help but feel that the team we’ve built at Sonic ID (and which undoubtedly many of you are building elsewhere, regardless of your niche) are well positioned to succeed as companies and agencies struggle to properly address their customers, each of whom are, at the end of the day, unique markets of one.

We are ethnographers, marketers, strategists, psychoacousticians, composers, musicians and experience designers. And we work in one of the very few areas — music, sound, voice and silence — that can connect the dots between people and the many experiences they encounter and participate in.

Okay, that’s enough hornblowing for now. In the coming weeks we’ll be mapping out four distinct approaches to implementing an audio identity and what that entails. We may even have a guest writer. Ladies and gentlemen, start your startup sounds…

Just a little note to let you know I haven’t forgotten about you. Posts have become infrequent lately, and that’s going to change soon.

There’s an awful lot of groundbreaking brainwork happening in the land of audio identity, and that means plenty of ideas for me to throw on the wall as you, I and the three other people visiting this site aim to further define and grow this industry we call audio identity. Or audio branding. Or audio experience design.

“Friendship update,” you ask…what’s with the subject title? That’s the name of a song by The Go! Team, and it just so happened to fit. For what it’s worth, here’s the ditty — happy listening. Life is good.

Create Digital Music recently pointed an interesting documentary on the 1980 remaking of the Doctor Who theme song. Which is, in the minds of many, one of those earworms you never really shake.

Wikipedia has far more on the story, enough to satisfy even the geekiest of fans.

One of the things I find interesting about this theme is its longevity — you know this song today, regardless of whether or not you’re a scifi nut. The song’s path winds from it original presentation when the show was originally produced in the 60s, through muddy fields of numerous remakes and finally emerges here on the web, today 2007.

Unfortunately, my familiarity for the Doctor Who theme doesn’t come from the show itself, but from the horrid 80s remake by the Timelords (aka KLF). The track lived in relative obscurity with decent life on college stations in the US and it saw some chart action in a few countries. And that’s how I fell into the trap…er…fold.

Like it or not, it’s yet another powerful example of sound’s longevity. A happy accident, you might say, for the folks behind the song. I’ll be discussing the relationships between brand and sound — and the opportunity to produce intentional happy accidents, so to speak — in the very near future, here at ye olde blogge. Stay tuned.

Noel Franus

Today NPR delivered a great “story” on the problem with ringtones in New York. The premise, in case you haven’t heard it: the city’s zillions of people and their mobile devices, with their cacophony of sounds, have created cultural chaos on the streets, in the subway and everywhere people have ears. The solution: let NYers choose from one of four officially sanctioned ringtones.

Imagine that. Four perfectly acceptable sounds, considered most acceptable to the ears for all. Four sounds that, ultimately, would speak for the City of New York everywhere its mobility enabled denizens went. Yes, four sounds that are the sonic identity of New York.

Great stuff. I’ll admit the producers had me going for a few minutes until I heard the original compositions, which were just plain…well…foolish. Happy April 1.