Chloe Cappelier: Sound design will be integrated into our environment.
Chloe Cappelier. Innovation Manager at Accenture Interactive R&D in France.
I am a musician. I play harp, classical music, Jazz, and electronic music.
A few years ago I was doing both engineering and music at the same time and reason told me to go with engineering.
Today I play in an orchestra, and I stay connected with the music world.
I’ve always wondered about how to combine business and music, and I feel like today we have trends happening that are driving and pushing audio and sonics to the front lines of our attention.
The first one is Screen fatigue, which is helping people explore new and exciting audio options like social audio and podcasts. The second is behavior change and mass adoption of headphones. The third is a better cognitive understanding of the effect of music on our brains, called the neuroscience of music. And finally, as we create new metaverses, we can create new sounds, new voices… literally invent any sound for any experience. And as we improve the technology for AR/VR we can play with fascinating new tools using music, algorithms, and sound.
I feel like In general sensory experiences have not been explored as much as they should have.
If we focus on sound alone, it represents the biggest opportunity for brands and services to explore, and experiment with. We have focused so much on developing the visual experience that it’s getting harder and harder to get people to wonder anymore. Everything looks so real!
There are many things we can do with sound, audio brand strategy, audio brand management, having an audio presence across all touch-points including mobile notifications, retail experience, audio customer service, or audio embedded in your product.
The biggest obstacle we face is thinking about sound holistically. We continue to think in silos, separating the way a brand is experienced based on output, but instead, we should think about the person absorbing senses as a holistic experience, the input.
Most brands don’t have audio strategies. That is amazing if you think about it.
Audio is processed faster than visuals by our brain.
Think about the sound a Mercedes door makes when it closes or the sound your AirPods make when they sync with your iPhone. Designers are in charge of the whole experience.
Hospitals are a great example of sounds and sonics, but not for a good reason: 95% of the “beeps” you hear are unnecessary. Cables not plugged, the sensor not being in the right place… these sounds are distracting because they don’t add relevant information to the nurse's brain, so they become cognitive pollution.
I didn’t know Accenture had a sonic logo, for example, some university researchers found it during a study. It’s kind of interesting that this is how I found out.
How do you find out what a brand sounds like? Like any other branding exercise, you do research with leadership, customers, and consumers. Just like you would do with a visual exercise, but instead of being visual is with audio.
In the future, I see how a designer will create sound design as integrated into our environment as possible. In essence the creation of sounds to fit and enhance our environment, eliminating unnecessary sound pollution around us. But it is going to take a while until designers think about all the senses.
It’s like we’ve been creating a music sheet with independent musicians and in the future, we will need to think about how all the instruments sound together.
Like a master composer, the future designer will integrate sounds and all the other senses into a master design experience.
If you take Jazz, for example, it is very agile and adaptive so imagine your personal sound in the future like a jazz band coming together in a beautiful way.
Even more, the future it’s not just about hearing, feeling is coming next. When we think about haptics and the evolution of touch and motion as a type of non-language communication, the options and possibilities are incredible.
Perhaps everything starts by making music more accessible to more people in schools, so everybody can see the benefits and the role music plays in our lives.
One last thing; Chloe’s favorite sound is laughter.
Which one is your favorite sound?
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