Appliance makers believe more and better chimes, alerts, and jingles make for happier customers. Are they right?
By Laura Bliss
he roar of the MGM lion. NBC’s iconic chimes. The godlike C-major chord of a booting Apple computer. Companies have long used sound to distinguish their brands and to create a sense of familiarity with, and even affection for, their products. Microsoft went so far as to tap the ambient-sound legend Brian Eno to score the six-second overture for Windows 95, a starry ripple trailed by a fading echo. Lately, however, the sounds have proliferated and become more sophisticated. Amazon, Google, and Apple are racing to dominate the smart-speaker market with their voice assistants. But a device need not speak to be heard.
No longer do household machines merely bing or plink or blamp, as they might have in a previous era when such alerts simply indicated that the clothes were dry or the coffee was brewed. Now the machines play snippets of music. In search of ever more tailored accompaniment, companies have turned to experts such as Audrey Arbeeny, the CEO of Audiobrain, which composes notifications for devices and machinery, among many other audio-branding pursuits. If you’ve heard the start-up pongs of an IBM ThinkPad or the whispery greeting of Xbox 360, you know her work. “We don’t make noise,” Arbeeny told me. “We create a holistic experience that brings about better well-being.”
You may be skeptical that an electronic jingle, however holistic, can make doing the dishes a life-affirming endeavor—or even one that might bind you, emotionally, to your dishwasher. But companies are betting otherwise, and not entirely without reason.
Human beings have always relied on sound to interpret stimuli. A good crackle is a sure sign that wood is burning well; the hiss of cooking meat might be the original branded audio experience. Pre-digital machines offered their own audio cues: Clocks ticked; camera shutters clicked. The noises may not have been intentional, but they let us know that stuff was working.
An early example of a device that communicated data through sound was the Geiger counter. Invented in 1908 to measure ionizing radiation, it makes an audible snap to signal the presence of alpha, beta, or gamma particles. (Viewers of HBO’s Chernobyl will understand why this is useful: The person operating the device can simultaneously observe the surroundings for visual cues of radiation.) Decades later, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory studying machine interfaces popularized a term for sounds that act as vessels for easily recognizable information: earcon. Like an icon, but aural instead of visual.
Post time: Sep-11-2023
