Musical Thinking: The Design of Sonic Experiences.
CfD Conversation 06 | October 29th 2021
Written by Sara Lenzi, Center for Design at Northeastern University
Introductions:
Every day, we are exposed to hundreds of sonic experiences.
But what is a sonic experience?
“a sonic experience is any moment in which we experience the world. While doing so we not only see it, but we also hear it, and what we hear gives us information on the context in which we are and how we relate to it, as well as provides us with an emotional connection to it.” — Sara Lenzi, Ph.D.
…And what is its relationship to what we call music?
“Music has had many definitions, from “sounding number” reflecting a rational order of the cosmos, to the art of “combining sounds to please the ear,” to the language of emotion, to (in a classic 20th century formulation) “humanly organized sound.” Each definition highlights something about what sound can do, while missing others, and a sense that “music” as a category and discipline is missing significant dimensions of sonic experience has informed recent turns to sound art and sound studies. Rather than moving us towards broadened and multiplied perspectives on sonic experience, however, it often seems like we’ve been moving towards greater divisions, where “music” is one thing and “sound” is everything else.” — Deirdre Loughridge, Ph.D.
We hoped to hear more of what these domains have in common, and how each offers skills, expertise, concerns, and questions that are mutually interesting and beneficial. We also wanted to eviscerate how we can actually design a sonic experience taking into account specific goals, specific contexts, and specific users; and in a historical moment in which designers are often challenged with creating more and more integrated and complex experiences for a more and more complex world. Can sound finally be recognized as a design tool to enhance users’ experience and complete our relationship to products and services? And how does the multi-faceted interrelation between sound and design — included for the first time in history among the themes of the Design Research Society Conference in 2022 — impact interdisciplinary design research?
Mileece, sonic artist, immersive ecology designer, and clean energy Ambassador, captured the audience’s attention, guiding us into her sonic world.
Since 2006 she has created biologically-driven electronic music, designing real-time, interactive, multi-sensorial bio-environments by transforming the bio-emissions of plants and people through “aesthetic sonification.” In 2020 she founded Biophilica with a mission of inspiring a culture of eco-citizenry, through the design of wonderous yet grounding experiences that foster connection to the biosphere.
Mileece | The secret sonic life of plants
Mileece grew up surrounded by electronic music tools and instruments. As a teenager, she learned how to code so that she could start designing her own music from scratch. She started experimenting with sensors to create interactive forms of music and generative art. Coupled with her deep relationship with nature, in particular with plants — an intelligent life form we tend to underestimate more often than not — and her urgency in communicating the need for us to act to save the planet, her experimental approach to music became the raw material with which she designs fully immersive sonic experiences. Her projects intend to make the public more aware of the secret life of plants (Tomkins, 1973) as intelligent beings to whom we owe most of our survival capability.
In 2004 she started experimenting with interactive music using sensors; applying them to physical, tangible remains of deforestation to create musical sculptures which worked as instruments that people could play in her installations. Starting in 2005, she began to experiment with plants, building her own tools to interface plants with software to generate music. She worked on integrating this music concept into the design of fully immersive environments in which the public may find itself immersed in mesmerizing gardens where haptic devices are used to trigger sounds of nature. Mileece builds these environments for museums, non-profits, galleries, festivals, and schools to combine the sonic experience with raising awareness for the need to interact and communicate with nature as a living environment that gives us life.
This then brought her to build hybrid environments that mix ecology with technology in unexpected, everyday places; such as school playgrounds, popup corners of the city, and permanent interactive installations. She has even created these interactive installations in places such as buses that don’t have a direct relationship with nature — such as big cities. During COVID-19 lockdown, she used machine learning algorithms to monitor the life of plants in composing music. She is now experimenting with VR systems in designing embodied experiences of nature while bringing more nature into people’s life.
Mileece’s mission is to bring nature into people’s lives with technology as a way to enhance our connection to ecology. Sound is vital to that.
Alexander | The key to the design of branded sonic experience
While Mileece mesmerized us with the power of sound art as a means to reflect and gain awareness of the natural world, Alexander showed us how the very same raw matter (sound and music) can take a step away from art in the classical sense, and become part of a brand strategy which communicates its values and mission to customers. Why do birds is a multi-award-winning sound branding and service design agency which helps brands and public institutions integrate sound into the customer experience and value chain. Why do birds recently started to offer service design consultancy to their clients: this way, sound can really become part of the brand’s entire user journey from the very first contact to customer loyalty building.
How is sound branding different from sound art?
For one thing, Alexander says, a brand comes with a clear idea of what a client is looking for. They want sound to be a part of their marketing strategy: sound designers at why do birds need to translate a client’s expectation of sound and music for their brand into a structured process. This is needed in order to design a comprehensive sonic experience that accompanies the customer at all touchpoints of the customer journey.
Alexander shared with us one of the latest why do birds projects: the audio branding strategy for the Swiss insurance brand Swiss Re, a real musical thinking journey from early concept development to co-designing with the client in composing a successful sound identity which thrilled the audience of the Conversation.
Swiss Re is an insurance company, an international leader among the providers of reinsurance, insurance, and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer. Working at the frontline of unexpected, dramatic events that no other companies would insure (civil wars, natural catastrophes, nationwide disasters, etc.). When the brand started the process of rebranding for their visual identity, they chose, for the first time in their history, to have sound branding too.
But how do you acoustically represent a brand that, in its own words, makes the world more resilient?
They have a dual strategy, grounded in the principles of composition — the identification of those principles that connect the main brand concepts with sound elements; and instrumentation — the sound design choices that transform those sound elements into a fully-fledged, consistent sound identity. In order to do this, why do birds ran an exploration workshop with the client. From the workshop, it emerged that human traits are one of the most important elements of the brand. And that resilience means, that whatever dramatic event you might go through over your life, you will always be able to come back to a state of calm, of balance, of feeling safe — and Swiss Re helps you reach that state.
Resilience is, in Alexander’s words, “the quality of maintaining or returning to a stable state.” To translate it into sound, why do birds started from the idea of ostinato, a repeating, single note that communicates stability and continuity over time. The note, like life, can change and evolve (in depth, in ‘size’, in pitch and loudness), but it always goes back to its original state.
Another key concept that the brand wanted to transmit is the importance of partnerships when facing exceptional, dramatic events. So a second musical element was added: a melody that became the motif of the brand to be used consistently across brand communication. As in a partnership, in the Swiss Re brand motif, two voices come together and move together both in difficulty (represented by the motif in minor key) and in serenity (represented by the motif in major key).
The two concepts — resilience, represented by the ‘One Note Principle’ and partnership, represented by the two-voices brand motif — were also condensed in the sound logo which accompanies the re-branded Swiss Re visual logo.
After deconstructing the why do birds design process for us, Alexander shared the Swiss Re video which presents the new brand identity: a 1:46 composition which gave goosebumps to the audience and clearly showed how sound can really bring engagement with a brand (a product or a service) to the next level.
Nicolas | A designerly way of knowing, thinking, and acting in (sound) design
The last of the panelists, Nicolas brought us back to the roots of the Conversation — is there room for a deeper relationship between design as a structured discipline and sound design, as a practice-based field that is struggling to find its way in the world of design research?
IRCAM, the Paris-based, internationally renowned research center on contemporary music, has a wide range of activities from the creation and dissemination of contemporary music performances and productions, to research on music as well as sound science and technologies.
Within the STMS department, Nicolas and his team have spent the last few years working on the interrelations between the science (and practice) of design and the science (and practice) of sound towards the definition of a design space for sound.
So, what is sound design?
“Sound design should not look for a definition elsewhere than within design itself […]. Why should we remove from design a sensory dimensions?” (Dandrel, in Rodriguez, 2003)
But exactly how are sound and design connected? Does sound + design = sound design?
Nicolas explained how Sound can be seen as descending from the larger field of Design — in a filiation relationship — while on the other hand, Sound Design, with its singularity, can feed into the wider world of design, bringing unique characteristics.
Through the definition of this mutual relationship, sound can be integrated into design as a structured discipline. In fact, Nigel Cross’s (2006) design research loci: people, process, and products can be applied to the study of the role of sound designers, the nature of designed sounds, and the specificities of the process of designing sounds.
To this point, we should add the study of how sound artifacts are received and perceived by the audience they are intended for: how do we perceive sound in our experience of usage? How can (sound) designers evaluate the design outcome?
In an interdisciplinary process, which is characteristic of design research, answering the first question implies a connection with basic research about sound perception and cognition while the second tackles a key question in all aspects of design — the need for evaluation and experimental protocols to address and assess the value of knowledge generated by and through design.
To close his presentation, Nicolas gave us an example of applied (sound) design research through one of his teams’ recent emblematic projects in an extremely relevant field: sound design for electric vehicles. In 2016 and 2017, IRCAM worked together with the composer Andrea Cera to design the voice of future mobility. Together with the French automotive brand Renault, they ventured on a journey to define and compose sounds for Renault’s high-tech concept electric and autonomous car. The car of the near future is silent and does not require our full-time attention as it drives itself wherever we want to go. The need for an efficient communication system between humans and machines is even more relevant for cars, due to the potential dangers of miscommunication.
Nicolas and his team designed both the external acoustic system which alerts pedestrians of an oncoming car and the internal auditory feedback system that keeps the passenger/driver informed on the car status and functioning. On one hand, the project presented a challenge that highlights how sound design still needs critical tools for prototyping, especially when it comes to product sound design. On the other hand, the project pushed them to explore the boundaries of the impact of future mobility on our everyday urban soundscape as well as how sound designers will be responsible for limiting the intrusiveness of new car sounds — combining functionality with both an aesthetic and environment-conscious approach.
For a glimpse of the project’s backstage and results:
Questions to the panelists
From the presentations, we learned how music and sound are crucial in shaping both our everyday experiences and relationships with our environments. But what happens now, in a historical moment in which designers are starting to feel that a human-centered approach is not enough, that there is something beyond humans — what do we as designers and artists need to consider? How do we design sound for a posthuman/non-human world in which living things — and perhaps, artificial intelligences too — are interdependent?
Mileece —
We live in a sonic world in which mechanical waves require a medium to exist and travel through. Plants and all other living creatures are evidence that we live in a non-human world and we would not exist if it weren’t for the plants that create the biosphere through which sound travels. The biosphere is also home to other creatures that require sound in order to function — to communicate, to mate. Therefore while we as humans want to become ever more creative, we need to do it in a way that does not impede on the sound that other creatures depend on to survive and live. You can make a ‘human-centric sound’ (that’s music!) but you can’t produce that in the atmosphere in a way that it infringes the right to live on this planet that other creatures have. That’s where we have to start to answer this question.
Alexander —
Often our clients say ‘we are human, we need to have a human-centered sound’ and interestingly for them, that’s ‘organic’, natural sounds. For us as composers, human-centered sounds are sounds that can be connected with the human performance of music (hands on a piano, an instrument being played) or with the human body: breathing, the heartbeat. Using voice is an extremely interesting, utterly human-centered approach to the design of a sound identity.
Nicolas —
We should look at the concept of acoustic niche, which hypothesized that eerie living species on the planet occupy a singular, distinct acoustic niche (a frequency band in the spectrum of sound) in order to communicate with other members of the family. It is an interesting concept because it tells us that if we designed our sound better, we could share the sound space with the creatures that are living, without any sound colonialism.
Comments from the chatbox
In practice we have already shifted to using the term Life-Centered…:-)
Agree in principle. Only caveat we have to acknowledge however: It will be always (?) the human POV/understanding/construction on whatever we center our design on.
I would worry that the ‘human POV’ is so vast that we will spiral out of control and the designs will fray into a number of conflicting experiences.
What is the relationship of the sonic experience with the architectural design of an acoustical space?
Nicolas shared…
the example of an artistic project, a sound installation that took place in a phalanstery — ‘a type of building designed for a self-contained utopian community, ideally consisting of 500–2000 people working together for mutual benefit, and developed in the early 19th century by Charles Fourier.’ (Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia). The installation, designed by the composer Cécile Le Prado, was tailor-made to the architecture of the place with the goal of immersing the listeners into the life of people who inhabited that place in the 19th century. The composer collected and composed sounds of that historical period to bring the place back to life through sound, in close contact with the architecture of the building.
Mileece is working on…
a concert in France which will take place on a piece of land with echos and reverbs in which, if you iterate a sound in that space you can learn about the shape of the landscape which you can’t see because it’s covered in trees. Sound and environments develop a very interesting relationship and how they interact with each other changes from day to day also depending on the occupants of the space. It is interesting to see how the public experiences composed sound differently as they move through the space or visit it in a different moment.
Alexander agrees…
that you can experience sound in so many different ways and it depends on the context in which it is played. By changing the conditions of the environment, you can change the whole perception of sound and you can create completely different experiences. Our experience of the world is truly shaped by the perceptions we receive through our senses, through temperature, material, scent, and sound.
So, what is it that brings together design, music and sound?
Sound is per se an interdisciplinary field, whether it is approached with music, the environment, or in the relationship with other living and non-living entities.
In the definition of the “four broad areas” of design presented by Buchanan, in his seminal “Wicked problems in design thinking” (1992), while symbolic and visual communication occupy the first place (followed by material objects, activities, organizational services, and complex systems) sound is completely absent. What this Conversation showed is that it is time for the intentional design of the sonic experience to find its place on the design map.
Want to know more? Watch the full conversation!
Moderators: Sara Lenzi, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Center for Design, CAMD, Northeastern University, Deirdre Loughridge, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Music, CAMD, Northeastern University
Panelists: Mileece, Sonic artist, immersive ecology designer, and clean energy Ambassador, Alexander Wodrich, Founder and CEO, why do birds, Nicolas Misdariis, Research Director, Head of Ircam STMS Lab / Sound Perception & Design team, IRCAM.
