And the science of using sound for persuasion/storytelling has been well-known in the movie business since they started talking in movies.

Consider also that Coke machines have made the same sound no matter if they dispensed glass bottles, cans, or plastic bottles. Hard to believe that’s an accident. My conclusion – a designed sound.

Answering srp above (“Suppose you found out that the sound … had been engineered … Would that ruin the experience?”) I’d have to say “No.” I’m kind of a geek, but it almost makes it better. It also gives more depth to the Harley roar for me.

The funny thing about marketers isn’t that they design this sort of thing and often get it wrong or overdo it…they don’t, in fact, do any of the work at all. The people who understand the impact of sound X (researchers and savvy designers) are rarely in touch with the people making the decisions to spout out a sound in the first place. You’ll never see an acoustic technician and CMO in the same room. So we wind up with what we do, obnoxious product sounds, websites and all.

I’m all for environmental sounds that provide affordances and improve public safety, etc. Not so wild about making noise for the sake of making noise. Thanks for bringing to light one of the seldom-made cases for wabi-sabi in the land of sonic brands.

My old Nikon makes it when you take a picture. It’s a product of the mechanics of the device.

My digital Lumix can make the same sound, if I wanted to. Reproduced and spit out of a tiny speaker. That “shutter” sound now stands for “a picture is being taken.” You can hear it everywhere. (I suppose I could hack the camera to make the sound of breaking glass if I were perverse.)

Someday in my sons’ future, when 35mm film is no longer made, that sound will still be made by devices when they take a photo, free of any referent at all.

I’ve just gotten back from a fabulous trip to Philadelphia for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I had the pleasure of speaking as part of the event and will post a full report of the panel I presented…

I once had a guy from 3M tell me that they made sure that Scotch Tape made a better sound when you peel it off the roll than its rivals. When 3M manufactured private-label tape for others, they tried not to make it sound as good. Sealed Air is going against this sort of thing, as their long-term strategy is apparently to shift away from Bubble Wrap to an otherwise superior technology that lacks the kinesthetic/acoustic appeal of BW.

http://www.coca-cola.com/template1/index.jsp?locale=en_US&site=../happiness_factory/index.html

gr8 post..thank you

What you say about software is one of the motivations, perhaps even the main one, for the open-source software movement. Companies want to fiddle-with and tweak their software applications, customize them to their own particular environment, even use them for new purposes unintended by the vendor (as you say), and doing all this usually requires customer access to the source code.

As Grant has been arguing, we marketers need to appreciate that marketing and advertising are now also in that same place: we are increasingly in a world with open-source branding, open-source product development, and even (or especially) open-source meaning-making. Marketers should embrace this new world, and develop techniques (analogous to von Hippel’s) for including everyone in the creation process. Maybe the success of open source software has something to teach us about how to do this.

There’s a lot to be said for releasing potential products (again, especially software) in a rough state (a place for “no meaning”) and letting the users make their own meaning, and following their lead.

Coke ad. Screen is black. Clink of quarters. Rumble of machine. Hiss of open can. Logo. Great, now we’ve created a beautiful campaign. It won’t really translate to print though. What do the follow up ads look like? What happens when Coke fights with the AE, about the ad being off message, and hires Crispin, Porter and that other guy whose name no one can pronounce? What then, oh great abstraction? What then KISS? Marketing sucks because marketing people suck. We are, as a whole, oftentimes better dreamers and buzzword dispensers than we are workers. We don’t let our agencies play, and when we do, they are usually too beat down to get up for the challenge. We are so scared about what the VP, or the C-suite, or the Board is going think, (a bunch of folks who, mind you, are nowhere near most target demographics) that we forget to let the creatives be creatives, and the thinking audience use their brains. I hereby declare this the ab-hocracy. Down with pandering, up with thinking.

I was in a Nissan dealership in the Ginza last month and the car door “chunk” was one of the most satisfying acoustic experiences I’d ever observed.

You might like to check out Noel Franus’ blog on “audio identity” – http://www.intentionalaudio.com/blog/