Intentional | Audio Identity Blog

We’re designers and brand stewards — we engineer perceptions. Given that, what do we know about sound? What don’t we know about sound? How can we use sound to create meaningful brand experiences and build brand value?

That’s what my Sonic ID colleague Martyn Ware and I explored in our recent DMI presentation in Cincinnati.

Here’s our presentation — enjoy!

| View | Upload your own

Stay tuned for more. I’ll be adding audio and writing up some of the more interesting audience questions later in the week.

– Noel Franus

Hear ye, hear ye, fans of sensory branding: Sonic ID will be in Manchester for b.TWEEN this weekend to explore the cutting-edge, converging boundaries between sound, art and commerce. Innovative brands take notice…

Does art exclude commerce? Can what works in the gallery work in-store? Are public installations models for future commercial applications? At b.TWEEN Sonic ID founders Martyn Ware and Dan Kirby will explain how experience gained in the artistic side of sound is helping shape the future of sensory branding, and leading to innovation in the commercial world.

– Noel Franus

Our second podcast is up: listen now. (MP3, 24 minutes)

In this second of a two-part interview with Martyn Ware (Heaven 17, Human League, Illustrious and Sonic ID) we hear about Martyn’s work with sensory design and immersive experiences in the healthcare environment. Also: what role does sound play in the recuperation process, and what can architects do to make life better for both guests, doctors and insurance providers?

Curious minds want to know. Give it a listen and let us know what you think. (MP3, 24 minutes)

Enjoy,

Noel Franus

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

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone beat me to it…

Japan’s Melody Roads Play Music as You Drive

Motorists used to listening to the radio or their favourite tunes on CDs may have a new way to entertain themselves, after engineers in Japan developed a musical road surface.

A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads”, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.

The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.

Here are four late-night links for the always-curious sonic-branding nut in each of us. Some of these may seem to be from left field, but there’s always something to learn. How can you apply some of the innovations/ideas/thinking that’s referenced below to your (or your client’s) brand/product experience?

The remote you’ve been waiting for
Dolby offers a new TV-volume leveler that actually sounds kinda interesting. Wild prediction: customers will love it, advertisers not so much. How long before Microsoft buys them out?

The music tool you’ve been waiting for?
Yamaha’s Tenori-On…it’s been out for a while, and I’ve avoided it because of its high-gimmick factor. (It’s very hard to believe anyone who pitches their “digital music instrument for the 21st century.”) But most reviews of the Tenori-On have been positive…so what gives? If you’ve played with this (perhaps at the MusicLive Show in Birmingham?), please share your thoughts.

The chair you’ve got to hear to believe
From Networked Music Review: “the Sound Chair begins as a sound that is precisely crafted to form the physical shape of a chair when visualized as a 3-dimensional object using a volume, time, frequency line plot. The life-size chair is an exact replica of the soundwave graph. The result is a product with dual existence as both a ’sound’ & a ‘chair.’”

The noise you won’t forget
Making Noise in NYC features “work by visual artists who utilize the many different modes by which sound is produced and received. Exploring the possibilities that lie within the relationship between producer and receiver, these artists demonstrate how the manipulation of sound can become a tool for the organization of power and, in turn, the subversion of it.” November 28, 2007 – January 2, 2008 at the Melville Gallery at the South Street Seaport Museum.

– Noel Franus

Photo by Sean Dreilinger

Ad Age’s CMO Strategy section today has an excellent piece on the strategic use of sound in…wait for it…products. Which is certainly something we agree with.

Snip:

Historically, marketers have focused more on use of sound to define corporate identity, not product brand identity — and it is more difficult to create an emotional connection to the corporate brand than to the product that the consumer can actually use or interact with. That’s why the real opportunity lies in leveraging sonic branding at the product or brand level.

This is the first Ad Age piece I’ve seen that would sit just as comfortably in a brand management, visual design, industrial design or even digital design magazine. Kudos to Donna Sturgess at GlaxoSmithKline and to Ad Age for the article.

Check out Warbike and Murmur, two newish sound-art projects that deserve attention because they bring experiential nuance to life — each in its own form adds new dimensionality to a world that’s normally right before our eyes.

The Warbike, for example, makes the w-fi networks around us audibly apparent: “Almost anywhere that you go in a city you’ll be sharing space with someone’s private wireless computer network…The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?”

Teaser CBC Radio clip on the Warbike below. (Full interview @ CBC here.)

Meanwhile, Murmur applies the usually personal concept of “placemaking” to public spaces: “We install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number (in a public space, such as a bus stop or park) so that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to (someone else’s) story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

Fascinating works, both applicable to brands — especially brands venturing into experiential marketing: these projects provide previously unseen tethers to other people and places, illustrating shared experiences where before there were none. And of course, we consumers human beings are fundamentally social at heart. We thrive on shared experiences.

In a commoditized world, it’s the brands that facilitate meaningful social ties like these that ultimately outlast brands that can’t (or don’t even bother to try). Warbike and Murmur show us two unique ways to leverage sound and make a shared experience come to life. What can you bake into your brand’s identity or customer experience that does the same?

– Noel Franus

The Ghost Army is a documentary film that tells the story of a secret WWII US Army unit whose sole purpose was to create a phantom presence on the battlefield. One of its primary tools was sound.

“The mission of this top-secret unit was to create a ‘traveling road show’ to deceive the Germans about the location and strength of American troops on battlefields across Europe. From Normandy to the Rhine, they staged 20 battlefield deceptions, employing an array of inflatables (tanks, trucks, jeeps, airplanes), sound trucks, phony radio transmissions and even playacting to fool the enemy. Like actors in a repertory theater, the men of the 23rd had to ask themselves with each mission: ‘Who are we this week? What’s our story?’ Then they would put on a show, with the Nazis as their audience.

But that’s only half the story…”

If you’re a regular reader of this site you know I’m a fan of the use of sound as a means of innovation, applicable not only to brands but social problems as well. Here’s a great example of sound applied to some bigger-picture questions. Makes you wonder what most brands are missing out on if they’re not asking “how can and should the intentional use of sound make this a better ______ ?”

More:

• Ghost Army entry at Wikipedia
• NPR on the Soliders of the 23rd.
• Book: Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II’s Heroic Army of Deception

Go ahead, smear our MP3 player all over your face. It’s good for your skin, says the makers of the new, ion-emotting mpion, available only in Japan.

Good times. Well if you accept the premise, then surely you’re wondering what music suits the mood…what’s the ideal playlist for a good facial audio-scrape? Allow me.

Now That’s What I Call Music, Acne Removal Volume 1

1. Push It, Salt N Pepa
2. Under Pressure, ZZ Top
3. Shine Halleluiah Shine, Bill Monroe
4. Skin Deep, The Stranglers
5. Perfect Skin, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions
6. Dirty Boogie, Roy Hall & His Cohutta Mountain Boys
7. Angels with Dirty Faces, Los Lobos
8. Back in Black, AC/DC
9. Rub Me Raw, Warren Zevon
10. Chess Piece Face, They Might Be Giants

(Via boing-boing.)

Ruth Simmons has an excellent piece on emotions and music at Brandchannel.com.

I’ve always defined the practice of audio identity and sonic branding as “the intentional use of music, sound, voice and silence to create a cognitive and emotional connection between people and organizations.”

Sure, I think that definition covers it, but Simmons’ piece expands on this in graceful, grokkable form. It’s valuable thinking as we grow this practice, this market, this business of choreographing brand perceptions through the strategic use of sound.

– Noel Franus

I was flipping through Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia — a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between who we are and what we hear — and noticed an entire chapter devoted to the power of earworms, those catchy audio mnemonics that we sometimes can’t get out of our heads.

The chapter, and much of the book, focuses on rare, intriguing neurological conditions. But with respect to earworms, Sacks touches on something that affects just about everyone: our inherent need for structure, form, and repetition in our music. In a way, we practically invite the earworm into our lives.

Here’s an excerpt:

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition. Every piece of classical music has its repeat marks or variations on a theme, and our greatest composers are masters of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to the repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.

You read vulnerability; some among us (ahem) understand that as an “opportunity.” And others, still, (ahem again) see this as a “challenge.” It’s both. And the art and science of leveraging this awareness of sound — for commercial and social purposes — is something we’ll hear about with increasing frequency in the near future.

– Noel Franus