Silence is No Longer an Option
How can we ensure sound is an integral part of user experience?
In 1998, I worked at Thomas Dolby’s company Beatnik on the very first sounds for websites. Our sound engine was baked into the browser and enabled websites to play high quality music when a visitor arrived, or to trigger sound effects on user events.

Although websites with sound seemed like a great idea at the time, many people hated the experience of a website interrupting your attention with automatic sonic intrusion.
Over time, interface designers learned that polite interfaces should be silent- but that was the wrong lesson. Instead of the unavoidable “BEEP” of a microwave, we can use sound to embed more meaning into our peripheral attention– enabling technology to work with our attention, not against it.
Today we have better speaker hardware, broader bandwidth, and fresh focus to holistic, multi-sensory user experience. There are great opportunities for sound design, and room to explore.
Sound and Nature
The natural world is filled with sound. Sounds are streaming into your brain right now without you even paying attention. You can hear the air conditioning in the office, or maybe the refrigerator at home, or your fingers on the keyboard. Hearing is a powerful sense. It is essentially impossible to close your ears. If something out of the ordinary occurs and makes a sound, like a teacup being dropped or a fire alarm going off, you attend to that sound immediately and unconsciously.

Today, users choose their own soundtrack to the digital experience. Users turn off their speakers so that so they do not impose on coworkers, and they hesitate to wear headphones in public for fear of missing the honking horn of an oncoming bus. When they do wear headphones, they are intentionally becoming unavailable to the world around them.
The Rise of Audio-First Interfaces
Until now, designers have been forced to assume their interfaces were silent and only include sound that is secondary to the visual interface. As a result, the sound design industry is nowhere near the size of the visual design industry.
The current state of the audio-first interface is similar to the early World Wide Web. Content providers do not fully control how their content is rendered. In 1994–95, users controlled the styling of content, but within a few years, the balance of power shifted to the developer rather than the consumer. That shift allowed corporations to brand the look and feel of their websites.

The commercialization of the Web was arguably the primary economic engine for the United States in the late ’90s. It shifted visual design into a much larger industry, as every business decided to build its own branded website. Early commercial projects for Fortune 500 companies routinely spent tens of millions of dollars on teams of newly minted web designers.
Beyond the financial impact, there was a rapid expansion in the design industry. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, the number of graphic design jobs in the US increased by 77% during the period dating from the public release of the first Web browser in September of 1993 to the peak of the industry in June of 2001. We also saw the creation of new fields of design, most notably web design and interaction design. More importantly, the Web spread graphic design literacy. Discussions of typeface, whitespace, and hierarchy spread from a small office in the back of the marketing department to the entire company.
It would be foolish to predict the commercialization of audio-first interfaces will be the economic engine that the World Wide Web was, but it will be significant. In the near future, there will be a massive expansion in the demand for audio design as corporations embrace audio-first devices and will want to brand how their content sounds to better reflect their company. The discipline of audio design will be formalized to the level of graphic design, and the general public will become conversant in the language of audio.
When Fiction Become Reality
Audio-first interfaces have been the the stuff of science fiction and have fallen broadly into two categories: the assistant who lives in a place like HAL_9000 from 2001 A Space Odyssey, and the assistant who lives in your ear like J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man. Only recently has voice recognition technology become sufficiently advanced to build a ubiquitous, reliable voice user experience.
Audio-First Home
The Amazon Echo is an audio-first interface intended to be used in the home. It is essentially a bluetooth speaker you primarily control with your voice, whereas most bluetooth speakers are primarily remote controlled with your phone. In addition to the high-quality speakers, it has an array of microphones that provide far-field voice recognition, whether or not music is playing. When I first used the Amazon Echo, I made the obvious comparison to the Federation Computer from Star Trek, wishing that I had one in every room of my house, and the keyword was “computer” instead of “Alexa.”

Although Echo’s capabilities include home automation, to-do lists, and ordering products, Echo’s most impressive feature is its extensibility. Developers can easily write new skills for the Echo and deploy the new features to their own device, or share them online. Uber released a skill allowing users to call for a vehicle: “Alexa, call me an Uber,” and a driver will arrive at their doorstep in minutes. I have programmed my Echo to tell me when my morning bus will arrive at the stop based on the bus’s GPS coordinates.
Audio-First Mobile
January 2014 marked the US release of Her, a Spike Jonze film showcasing his version of an audio-first interface. Whenever Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) interacted with his operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansen), he wore a conspicuous single-ear earbud. This earbud allowed Theodore to listen to Samantha, but also kept his other ear open to the world around him.

In the months that followed, nearly 16,000 Kickstarter backers supported the creation of the “world’s first wireless smart in ear headphones” with well over $3m in pledges. Now ready to ship the first commercial model, Bragi Dash Pro boasts an expensive $329 price tag. The Dash allows the wearer to hear the world around them while also hearing and talking to their smartphone via Bluetooth.
The Dash is more than a pair of wireless headphones as Echo is more than a Bluetooth speaker. The Dash is an audio-first computing platform that includes 23 sensors to provide context. For example, the Dash can tell when you shake your head and when your heart-rate increases. More importantly, the Dash can help the user isolate which audio they want to hear — real world or virtual. Competitive products with a wide array of features have been announced by Intel, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Google, as well as niche players like Here Active Listening.
Opportunities for Sounds and Brands
Sound design for products is a small but growing industry. Sonic branding agencies develop a identities through sound, like traditional branding agencies do through visuals. These branding engagements might be as small as developing a sonic logo, or as large as the recent 22 month overhaul of Vienna’s public transit system audio.
Currently, the capacity for sound on these audio-first devices is controlled by the device manufacturer. Amazon Echo, for example, always speaks in Alexa’s voice, and doesn’t change when running a given company’s software. However, when Home Depot launches an app for Amazon Echo, I suspect they will want the voice of their spokesman, Josh Lucas, to represent them. And Motel 6 will want Tom Bodet to echo the company’s signature phrase: “We’ll leave the light on for you,” instead of Alexa. In addition to the voice, brands will want their own music and earcons — audio icons — to represent them. Giving companies the choice to brand content on through sound could be as crucial as graphic design.
Silence is No Longer an Option
As designers, when we leave our applications silent, we ignore a key dimension of interaction. The coming adoption of audio-first interfaces has already increases the demand for audio services. Branding funded the Dot-com Boom and branding will fund significant growth in audio design. Let’s work together to make meaningful, high quality sound that enables, instead of disables!
Need more convincing?

Researcher Amber Case and Sound Designer Aaron Day will release a new O’Reilly book covering opportunities for sound design in Designing Products with Sound in late 2018.
What do you think the opportunities are for sound, brand, and user experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts on Twitter!
This article was updated to reflect changes in the industry, and was originally posted on MAYA.com in 2016.
