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/ DESCIFRANDO EL CÓDIGO
SOBRE EL SONIDO EN EL DISEÑO
DE EXPERIENCIAS
Escrito por Kevin Perlmutter y Anjali Nair de Man Made Music con el socio de
investigación Cyrus McCandless, PhD, Sentient Decision Science

INTRODUCCIÓN

Todos los días, desde el momento en que nos despertamos, estamos inmersos
en el sonido. El despertador, que lo despierta de una sacudida, el chirrido de
los vehículos en el tráfico, los sonidos frecuentes de las alertas de teléfonos
inteligentes, el zumbido sutil de un aire acondicionado, el llanto inevitable de un
bebé en un vuelo, etc., un subrayado interminable que nosotros a menudo se

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desconecta. Pero nos demos cuenta o no, estos sonidos afectan nuestro
estado mental, nuestro comportamiento y nuestra percepción última de las
experiencias.

El sonido provoca un tiempo de reacción hiperrápido en los seres humanos,

aproximadamente 30 milisegundos más rápido que los tiempos de reacción a
las imágenes (Johnson et al., 1985). Por lo tanto, incluso antes de tomar
conciencia del significado o la fuente de un sonido, hemos tenido una
respuesta emocional instintiva, ya sea positiva o negativa. Luego, la
información se procesa por completo, lo que lleva a una evaluación de si
nuestra reacción instintiva fue apropiada para la situación. Esa reacción inicial
de una fracción de segundo a un sonido es vital: establece nuestro estado
emocional y colorea nuestras expectativas de una experiencia.

Nuestras respuestas altamente emocionales al sonido tienen una base

biológica. Investigadores de la Universidad de Newcastle descubrieron que la
amígdala, el "centro de las emociones" del cerebro, desencadena una mayor
actividad en la corteza auditiva, la parte del cerebro que procesa la información
auditiva, cuando se perciben sonidos desagradables en lugar de suaves
(Kumar, Kreigstein, Friston , & Griffiths, 2012.) En otras palabras, cuando
escuchamos un sonido angustioso, la parte emocional de nuestro cerebro insta
a nuestros sensores auditivos a animarse y prestar atención.

Si bien esto puede haber comenzado como un rasgo evolutivo para promover
la supervivencia de nuestra especie, tiene implicaciones duraderas en la vida
actual. El ruido desagradable se ha relacionado con el estrés mental y físico,
incluida la ansiedad, el aumento de la presión arterial y la frecuencia cardíaca
(Stansfield, 2016). De manera similar, la falta de control sobre el entorno
sonoro de uno puede crear insatisfacción con el lugar de trabajo (Lee, et al.,
2015), y alrededor del 20% de nosotros experimentamos misofonía: reacciones
involuntarias a ciertos sonidos que son tan extremos que causan una
interferencia significativa con las relaciones y capacidad para realizar tareas
sencillas (Wu, et al., 2014).

Yet, most are quite unaware that sound powerfully affects the way we
experience the world. Oblivious to the inner processes modulating behavior,
people like to believe that they’re in control of their actions. However, decision-
making is not based in pure reason and logic, as we often assume. Whom we
befriend, whom we vote for, and most interestingly to marketers – what we buy
– are all susceptible to influence from our subconscious (Bargh, 2014).

Since responses to sound often make first impact below the threshold of
awareness, it has been difficult to study its effect through conscious means
traditionally used in market research. This may be one key reason why sound is
often the lowest priority in the creation of products and experiences. Our
modern world has too much of what we call Sonic Trash. Sonic Trash describes
the harsh, grating sounds that add no value to an interaction and can cause
people to tune out or avoid an experience completely.

Man Made Music and Sentient Decision Science collaborated on an initial

SonicPulse® Research study to quantify the impact of sound on people’s
subconscious emotional responses as it relates to a variety of experiences. The

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results provide new data and insight into the key and often misunderstood
relationship between sound, design, and human behavior.

Through our research with Sentient, we have tested and now are able to prove
the value of making sound an early component of the design process. When we
eliminate Sonic Trash, or bad and purposeless sounds, and replace it with
sounds that better serve the experience, we improve outcomes for public
wellness and business results.

Learnings show that as contributors to the built environment, designers and

brands who neglect to consider the immense influence that sounds can have
on consumers and the public will lose out on attention, loyalty, relationship and
business outcomes.

“The initial split-second reaction to

a sound is important – it
establishes our emotional state and
colors our expectations for an
experience.”

M E T H O D O LO G Y

The benchmark wave of this initial study evaluated a broad range of

recognizable sounds on their emotional appeal and their effect on desire for an
experience. Since we rarely experience sound in isolation, the study also
analyzed the influence of visual context on the perception of sound.

Nine-hundred adult participants (US, General Population) were recruited by

Sentient Decision Science to complete an online survey evaluating sounds on
emotional appeal and respondent’s desire to engage or avoid an experience
associated with those sounds.

As part of the study, twenty short-form sounds (:03 in length) were evaluated on
key measures. The stimuli consisted of ten Naturally-Occurring Sounds, which
were incidental or environmental, along with ten Designed Sounds, which were
created intentionally as part of a product, brand identity, or experience. All the
stimuli were sourced from existing sonic libraries and recordings of
experiences.

I M P L I C I T A S S O C I AT I O N T E S T I N G

Historically, observing sub-conscious thought processes required expensive

and obtrusive techniques such as Electroencephalography (EEG) or Functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). More recently, however, the development
and refinement of a research technique called Implicit Association Testing
(“IAT”) has allowed researchers to cost-effectively and accurately quantify the
impact of emotion on behavior.

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We chose implicit association testing (“IAT”) as the foundation for the project
because it met all of the methodological requirements for the study, namely (1)
cultural/linguistic agnosticism, (2) the ability to isolate true subconscious
responses that are not subject to respondent control or manipulation, and (3)
sufficiently cost-effective to replicate in multiple countries, each with sample
sizes large enough to permit analysis on a segmented basis.

IAT is a computerized experiment – typically administered via computer,

smartphone, or tablet – that scientifically measures the strength of an
individual’s automatic associations between concepts (e.g., products, concepts,
brands, sounds, etc..) and either attributes (e.g., energetic, innovative,
trustworthy) or emotions (e.g., excitement, contentment, boredom, anger, and
so on). It combines affective visual priming and response time, requiring
participants to rapidly and correctly categorize target concepts with an attribute,
such that easier pairings (faster responses) are interpreted as more strongly
associated in memory than more difficult pairings (slower responses).

Respondents are first asked to correctly sort a series of images representing

emotions into one of two categories – either Positive or Negative. Their speed
and accuracy is measured as an individual cognitive baseline against which
their results will be normalized – thus, data can be aggregated across
individuals with differing levels of cognitive speed. There are right and wrong
answers to this baseline cognitive task, so respondents must make a conscious
and reflective judgment.

Respondents then complete the same task while being intermittently primed
with a stimulus (audio and/or visual). Their speed and accuracy are measured
again; the irrepressible subconscious response triggered by each stimulus
serves as a distraction that can make it harder to complete the sorting task
quickly and accurately. Differences between test and baseline metrics reflect
implicit cognitive or emotional association between the stimulus and the target
image or sound.

The results are scored along an index, which is scaled from 0 to 200, with the
midpoint of 100 representing a neutral emotional association. Results above
that point represent positive subconscious emotional associations, and those
below that point represent negative ones. A deviation of +/- 5 points indicates
moderate emotional impact, while a deviation of +/- 10 points indicates extreme
emotional response.

EMOTIONAL APPEAL

Emotional Appeal of sounds was tested using IAT. During this part of the
experiment, respondents were asked to quickly and accurately sort emotions,
primed by a short sound clip.

Later in the study, the emotional appeal of sounds was tested in-context using
the same method. Two pairs of sounds were tested with corresponding images,
allowing us to evaluate each sound pair against its visual context. Each pair
consisted of a sound hypothesized to be pleasing and a sound hypothesized to
be distressful. The results were then compared to those from the sounds in
isolation to identify the effects of context.

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D E S I R E TO E N G AG E O R AVO I D

Conscious desire for an experience was evaluated through a Maximum

Difference Scaling Choice experiment, an established test of preference in
marketing research. Participants were asked to consider the experience
associated with a set of presented sounds and to select the experience they
would seek out the most, as well as the one they would want to avoid the most
in the future. This was repeated through several cycles to establish a hierarchy
of the most desirable and most aversive sounds.

“Our reactions to Naturally

Occurring Sounds provide
powerfully intuitive reference points
for evaluating emotional responses
to Designed Sounds.”
– C Y RU S M C C A N D L E S S , P H D, V P S C I E N T I F I C D I S C OV E RY A N D
I N N OVAT I O N , S E N T I E N T D E C I S I O N S C I E N C E

OUTCOMES

As a result of our research, we established the first Sonic Humanism™

Spectrum

The Sonic Humanism™ Spectrum scores sounds based on their emotional

appeal to a representative sample of respondents from most appealing to most
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distressing. The ranking is indexed to Sentient Decision Science’s database of

millions of sensory stimuli that have gone through IAT over more than a
decade.

What we discovered reveals the significance of subliminal processes; there’s a

dramatic 86% correlation between our subconscious emotional response to a
sound and our conscious desire to engage with an associated experience or
avoid it in the future.

Which means, if you’re not thoughtfully considering sound in your experience,

you could be unintentionally causing a large majority of people to want to avoid
the experience.

The Sonic Humanism™ Spectrum research found that a pained scream was
the most unpleasant sound tested (Emotional Index = 91.5) while that of baby
laughter was the most pleasant (Emotional Index = 116.8). These scores offer
an objective measure of what we instinctively know: the instantaneous
discomfort caused by a scream of pain, and the delight of a baby laughing.

Our reactions to Naturally Occurring Sounds provide powerfully intuitive

reference points for evaluating emotional responses to Designed Sounds.
Surprisingly, many sounds emitted by products fall in a territory that indicates a
lack of purposeful sonic design from the companies that create them. For
instance, the well-known Emergency Broadcast Weather Alert (Emotional Index
= 93.2) ranks between a pained scream and nails on a chalkboard – two of the
most emotionally displeasing sounds out there, statistically speaking. Several
other Designed Sounds, such as the piercing beep of a microwave and the
harsh signal of a credit card chip reader rank poorly in emotional appeal as
well.

Some of these iconic sounds were created decades ago, when the technology
or hardware of a product could not accommodate more artful sonic design.
Luckily, it is now possible to break the convention of using anxiety-inducing
tones to convey relatively innocuous messages and set a higher standard for
Designed Sounds.

W E E S TA B L I S H E D T H E S T R O N G R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N
SOUND & DESIRE

We discovered that subconscious emotional appeal of a sound is 86%

correlated with our conscious desire to engage with an experience or avoid it.
The implication for brand and product designers is that sound can create or
destroy value, depending on how effectively it’s used. No matter how small or
expansive the medium, designers can bring empathy, efficiency, and emotional
engagement to an experience by purposefully creating and curating emotionally
appealing sounds. This in turn will drive consumers’ desire to interact with the
brand or product in the future.

W E F O U N D T H AT T H E C O N T E X T I N W H I C H A S O U N D I S H E A R D
A M P L I F I E S I T S I M PA C T

In most experiences, sound is part of a larger context. To understand the way

people normally experience some of the tested sounds, we paired them with an
appropriate image to create a real-world context and reassessed emotional

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appeal.

Two variations of a Home Security Keypad Alert (Sound A and Sound B) were
presented with identical images of a home security keypad to reproduce the
context in which the sound would typically be heard. The intention of both
sounds is to remind someone re-entering their home to turn off the security
system. Results showed that the emotional valence associated with a sound
amplified the relatively mundane experience of returning home and turning off
an alarm.

Sound A was slightly unpleasant in isolation (Emotional Index = 96.8), but when
paired with the context of the keypad alert it was perceived as even worse
(Emotional Index = 94.7). Note that the sound itself is not an alarm – the
emotional distress it causes is ill-suited to the context. In contrast, Sound B was
emotionally neutral in isolation (Emotional Index = 100.3). Given the visual
context of the keypad, it was significantly more pleasing (Emotional Index =
103.5). Thus, when Sound B delivered the message to turn off a security alarm,
it was perceived as a friendly, welcome reminder rather than a harsh, anxiety-
inducing alert.

Another example that illustrates the importance of context involves weather

alerts. We compared the aforementioned EBS Weather alert sound (Emotional
Index = 93.2) to a alternative created for The Weather Channel (Emotional
Index = 107.8). Each sound was presented alongside an image of a phone
screen with the weather alert “Heavy rain and thunderstorm.”

In context, the EBS Weather Alert was statistically just as unappealing as the
sound in isolation (Emotional Index = 93.3). In contrast, TWC’s alert in isolation
was one of the most pleasant Designed Sounds on the Sonic Humanism™
Spectrum. When presented in-context, it produced a slightly negative emotional
response (Emotional Index = 98.7), successfully relaying the message it was
paired with. Comparing the EBS and TWC alerts is telling; the level of distress
signified by the EBS alert is disproportionate to the urgency of the message,
which is non-life-threatening. TWC alert manages to deliver the same
unpleasant message, without completely degrading the user experience.

Based on these outcomes it becomes clear that designers would do well to

consciously evaluate the sounds they create or utilize to ensure coherence with
the product or experience. Sound should not only guide the emotional
responses of the user, but also convey meaning and fit to purpose.

“Some of these iconic sounds were

created decades ago, when the
technology or hardware of a
product could not accommodate
more artful sonic design”

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I M P L I C AT I O N S

The new insights uncovered by Sentient Decision Science and Man Made
Music provide compelling evidence underscoring the emotional and
communicative power of sound. By establishing the Sonic Humanism™
Spectrum, we now have quantitative and intuitive methods to compare and
measure Naturally Occurring and Designed Sounds based on their
subconscious emotional appeal. Our discovery of a high correlation between
the emotional appeal of a sound and desire reveals that it’s not enough to
simply create pleasing sounds. Designers should also compose sound that is
context-appropriate and reflects the emotionality of the larger experience.

Instead of leaving sound as an afterthought, our research shows why designers

should treat it as an integral component of their process. When used well,
sound can add value to businesses. However, when used poorly, it can damage
consumer loyalty and engagement.

There are larger public health considerations at stake as well. A growing body
of evidence demonstrates the harm of noise related disturbances.
Understanding the impact of sounds at different points along the Sonic
Humanism Spectrum™ can address the problem of noise pollution and the
harm caused by Sonic Trash. Life and society can be richer and simpler when
sound is thoughtfully considered and designed.

WORKS CITED

Bargh, J. A. (2014). Our unconscious mind. Scientific American, 310(1), 30-37.

Johnson, R. C., & Al, E. (1985). Galton’s data a century later. American
Psychologist, 40(8), 875-892. doi:10.1037//0003-066x.40.8.875

Lee, P. J., Lee, B. K., Jeon, J. Y., Zhang, M., & Kang, J. (2015). Impact of noise
on self-rated job satisfaction and health in open-plan offices: A structural
equation modelling approach. Ergonomics, 59(2), 222-234.
doi:10.1080/00140139.2015.1066877

S. Kumar, K. von Kriegstein, K. Friston, T. D. Griffiths. Features versus

Feelings: Dissociable Representations of the Acoustic Features and Valence of
Aversive Sounds. Journal of Neuroscience, 2012; 32 (41): 14184 DOI:
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1759-12.2012 Stansfeld, S. (2016, February 3). Can
noise pollution damage your health? Retrieved from
https://theconversation.com/can-noise-pollution-damage-your-health-54016

Wu, M. S., Lewin, A. B., Murphy, T. K., & Storch, E. A. (2014). Misophonia:
Incidence, Phenomenology, and Clinical Correlates in an Undergraduate
Student Sample. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 70(10), 994-1007.
doi:10.1002/jclp.22098

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/ ABOUT
MAN MADE MUSIC

Man Made Music is a global sonic studio dedicated to creating iconic and
enduring music and sound to solve creative, human and business challenges.
Their work began in television 20 years ago, creating themes for networks and
shows (Entertainment Tonight, HBO, CBS This Morning, Super Bowl on NBC,
ESPN 30 for 30) and has evolved to include pioneering musical approaches for
global brands and products (Nissan, Citi, AT&T, iRobot, Deloitte).

Man Made Music founder, Joel Beckerman, is a known thought leader it the
world of sound and business, author of The Sonic Boom: How Sound
Transforms the Way We Think, Feel and Buy and a Fast Company Most
Creative. The Man Made Music team have been featured on stage at major
conferences including SXSW, C2 Montreal, Cannes Lions, Fast Company
Innovation Festival and WSJ D.Live, as well as in major media such as Wired,
AdWeek, Forbes and HBR.

SENTIENT DECISION SCIENCE

Sentient brings visionary advances from the behavioral sciences to the

business community in practical and accessible ways. An internationally-
recognized pioneer in the development of research technologies, Sentient taps
the consumer subconscious and quantifies the impact of emotion and sensory
input on choice. Sentient has placed in Greenbook’s “Top 50 Most Innovative
Research Organizations” for 3 years running and was awarded the prestigious
EXPLOR award for impact and innovation in market research in both 2011 and
2018. Their technologies are coupled with deep knowledge of behavioral
economics, the essence of emotional branding, and quantitative models of the
drivers of human behavior to provide deep insight and actionable results for our
clients.

SONICPULSE® RESEARCH

SonicPulse® Research is Man Made Music’s proprietary capability to assess

the impact and effectiveness of music and sound. With our research partners,
Sentient, we utilize Implicit Association Testing to understand both
subconscious and rational responses to sound. For its impact and innovation in
market research, SonicPulse Research was the 2018 EXPLOR Award winner
and was recognized in the 2018 GRIT 50.

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