The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy
240
The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy
240eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
From movie scores and national anthems to cell-phone dings and squeaky shoes, sound and music impact how we perceive the stories, situations, and products we encounter every day. In The Sonic Boom, composer and strategic sound expert Joel Beckerman reveals sound’s surprising power to influence our decisions, opinions, and actions in ways we might not even notice: discordant ambient noise can induce anxiety; ice cream truck jingles can bring you back to your childhood.
You don’t need to be a musician or a composer to harness the power of sound. Companies, brands, and individuals can strategically use sound to get to the core of their mission, influence how they’re perceived by their audiences, and gain a competitive edge. Whether you’re a corporate giant connecting with millions of customers or a teacher connecting with one classroom of students, the key to an effective sonic strategy is the creation of “boom moments”—transcendent instants when sound connects with a listener’s emotional core.
“Equal parts sociological study and business advice, using unique everyday examples—for instance, how the fate of the Chili’s fajita empire rested on the sound of the sizzling platter, and how Disneyland approaches soundscapes for a fully immersive experience—to explain how sound effects our mood and shopping habits.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Music defines us. Joel Beckerman knows. Let him tell you all about it.” —Anthony Bourdain
“The Sonic Boom reveals the music and structured cacophony of everyday life.” —Moby
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544230361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Night-Vision Goggles for Your Ears
On September 26, 2011, Sarah Churman, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two from Fort Worth, Texas, got into her car with her husband. When she closed the door, she says, the noise of it shutting sounded like a bomb going off. Sarah grabbed her phone and dialed her mother-in-law. During the call, one of her two daughters hopped on the line. "Hi, Mommy, I love you," she said. Sarah started bawling so hard that she couldn't catch her breath.
When her husband, Sloan, pulled off the highway later and Sarah opened her door, she said the sound of traffic was roaring. The horns honking and engines revving were thunderous. The two made their way into an Outback Steakhouse and got a table. When the waitress put their drinks down, Sarah jumped at the startling sound. When she began to eat her salad, the crunch of the lettuce was so powerful she couldn't hear what her husband was saying. The noise in her own head was like a cheap used-car commercial with the sound turned up to eleven. It was almost deafening.
Sarah was born with profound hearing loss. For years, she hadn't been able to hear anything quieter than eighty-five decibels. You could rev a gas-powered chain saw or shoot a .22-caliber rifle right next to her ear, and it would sound to her like a mumble. Then Sarah had a device surgically implanted in one ear. It processed sound vibrations, amplified them using the middle-ear bones, and sent them off into Sarah's brain, a task most people's ears handle naturally with tiny hairs (which Sarah was born without). Even in the most successful cases, recipients of the kind of implant Sarah got don't perceive sound quite the same way as people born without hearing problems do. But it's the next best thing. Her mother-in-law used the money she'd saved for retirement to pay for Sarah's surgery. Eight weeks after it, when Sarah's ear had healed, a technician turned the device on, and Sarah began to hear for the first time in twenty-nine years. Sarah truly appreciates the power of sound, something most of us take for granted.
If her name sounds familiar, you might have seen Sarah's first moments of hearing on YouTube or on Ellen DeGeneres's daytime talk show. Sloan captured the event on video and uploaded it. Then it went viral. By mid-2013, more than twenty million people had watched the clip: "Twenty-nine years old and hearing myself for the first time!" It's a heart-melting scene. The slender, brown-haired woman with a full sleeve of tattoos on her right arm stares doe-eyed at a technician, who slowly dials up Sarah's equipment. There's some beeping that Sarah hears first, and then you can see the full breadth of sound wash over her as the implant comes alive. She'd worn hearing aids most of her life, but she described them as always having a constant hum or white noise in the background and allowing her to hear only the loudest external sounds, and even then, every sound blended together so they all sounded muffled or garbled, like Charlie Brown's teacher. This sound was different: clear, bright, and loud as hell. In the YouTube video, she tries to play it cool when the device starts working. That goes to pot in about one second. The flood of emotion that comes with her new sense is almost too much for her to bear. She's self-conscious, so she covers her mouth, which is the way a proficient lip reader like her tries to hide what she's feeling. When Sarah starts shaking and tears start flowing, though, the emotion is obvious. And it's contagious. You can't help but imagine what's happening in her head.
In her memoir Powered On, Sarah shares a perspective you can't get from the video alone:
I realized I could hear the noises coming from my mouth. Then I realized how I sounded, and I got choked up. Then I laughed, and that sent me into a fit of tears. All these sounds were intensified because I was hearing all of this from inside myself for the first time, and I was completely and utterly overwhelmed like you cannot imagine. I feared my heart was gonna explode, and I just couldn't put into words what was racing through my mind.
"I don't want to hear myself cry," she says in the video. Then she laughs and surprises herself. "My laughter sounds so loud!"
"You'll get used to that over time," the technician says.
But it took a while.
It's impossible for a person born with hearing to know what it's like to suddenly get it after twenty-nine years. Even beginning to understand how much sound is all around you is an eye-opening experience. Ever feel frazzled and then realize the TV is blaring an annoying ad or news or a program you don't actually care about? That moment and the next one, when you turn off the TV, is a very basic example of soundscaping. That's the practice of identifying and controlling the sounds affecting you — the loud ones in the foreground, the slightly lower, less important ones in the midground, and the foundational rumblings or whisperings in the background. Some people call the act of noticing these various levels of sound "active listening." Soundscaping is something more. It involves determining which of those sounds are most useful to you, whether you're trying to find your way, figure out what's going on around you, tell a story, or change your mood. Put to use in all kinds of everyday situations, soundscaping is how you use the identification and curation of sound and music to make your world work better. In a way somewhat similar to how Sarah began to hear new sounds and understand the messages they carried, you can grow your sonic vocabulary, the palette of sounds you recognize and use to tell stories or design environments. You can also use this sonic vocabulary to create your own messages and impressions. To get started, you can do a little exercise that will give you a sense of how much sound you're missing at any given moment: Close your eyes and listen to your surroundings, wherever you are. As you do, think about the word wind. Do you suddenly hear air moving against things? Next, think about your own ears ringing. Do you immediately hear it?
Now close your eyes again. This time, keep them closed for a full two minutes and try to identify each tiny sound you hear. In the first few seconds, you'll probably notice the loudest sounds first: the music on the television in the other room, a door closing next to you. That's the foreground. But go deeper. Sit with it for a while. Maybe you hear highway traffic a mile away, or the sound of kids outside playing. That's the background. The midground is everything between the background and the foreground.
The longer you listen and the more you pay attention, the more you'll hear. You're not activating some kind of superpower or bionic hearing. You're not even hearing these sounds for the first time. These vibrations have been picked up by your ears all along. You just may not be used to paying attention to them. People who practice yoga or certain types of meditation might be more familiar with identifying sounds, but they may not have considered how these sounds might be affecting them in every moment or how these sounds might ultimately be curated, in the same way a museum director picks a mix of art for the walls.
You can discover lots of information in those sounds. They can make you aware of someone selling you something or explain why you feel certain ways at certain times in certain places. When you become aware of so many more sounds, you start to understand yourself better, and you might even start to use more of your brain in the process. Even if you've always been able to hear, there's plenty you might be missing Sarah's brain wasn't trained to bring certain sounds to her attention while filtering out less important ones. In the first few hours after her implant was turned on, she heard just about every sound most of us tune out. Sloan tried to remind her of what the doctors had told her: Her brain was firing in all kinds of new ways, and it would take time for her to adjust. Unlike most of us, she didn't have a rich catalog of sonic memories to draw from. Most of us can quickly decipher meaning in ambiguous statements based on tone. We know when someone's joking or being ironic. Not Sarah — she found sarcasm baffling. She'd also never heard her children speak and didn't know how to pick their voices out of a crowd; on the playground, every cry of "Mommy!" seemed directed at her. She was building almost everything from scratch. Sometimes she'd think her truck engine sounded off kilter, even though it wasn't. She'd hear her girls and dart upstairs thinking there was something wrong with them, but they were just playing or being loud. She was startled when the air conditioning kicked in. "Public toilets are insanely loud and make my heart pound every time I flush one. Loud restaurants or bars wear me out," she says. The experience sometimes proves too intense for people who get cochlear implants, and they choose to have the devices taken out. Pretty quickly, though, Sarah began to revel in it all. "I just have more of an appreciation for such things. My dogs grunt and snort when they breathe (I have bulldogs). Cabinet doors squeak. The microwave is loud while it cooks. The fridge runs and makes noise," Sarah said in an interview for this book. It took some time for her to figure out which sounds to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. She had to decide which ones told her stories, communicated valuable information, or helped her know how to feel, judgments most of us make every second of the day without realizing it.
"I pay more attention and take time to listen to them even though they are typical 'mundane' things to others," Sarah says. The irony is that in learning how to pay attention to certain things, Sarah was already training her brain to tune most things out — otherwise, every day would have been like those first few chaotic hours after she'd had her aural implant dialed up. Now, she says, even candy wrappers seem delightful. "I can now hear my phone no matter where it is. A big one was buttons in a car, when you push them they make noise. Buttons on a lot of things make noise!"
In fact, everything makes sound, even the moving of liquid and gas through your internal organs, the friction of air moving across your inner ear, and the fluid in your joints. Since the beginning of time, the universe has whispered and roared. From the cosmological to the quantum level and beyond, we find energy constantly vibrating. This vibration is the root of all sound. It's innate. It's primal. And almost every animal hears or at least senses it. There are plenty of vertebrates who are born without the ability to see or smell or taste. But nothing with a backbone is naturally born without the ability to detect sound vibrations in one form or another. Humans are wired to hear even before they're born; an infant knows its mother's voice before anything else. Archaeologists report finding music in all prehistoric societies of Homo sapiens. "With the exception of those who suffer from a cognitive deficit, all individuals have a capacity to acquire language and are born with an inherent appreciation of music," writes Steven Mithen in his 2007 book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. Long before sound activates the rational mind, it dramatically shapes our reality. Sound helps us intuit friend or foe, danger or delight, joy or despair. It's the most visceral, potent way we reach out and connect with one another and our world.
Sound is at the core of our belief structures. The Bible states, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God." Hindus and Buddhists hold that the sacred syllable om is the primordial sound of creation. Sound itself, however, is agnostic. It's the hook and trigger in every able-eared human's most cherished memories and most basic emotions. It makes each of us feel something in an instant.
There's a perfectly rational reason you don't think about all of this: you don't have to. People are constantly having sonic experiences, whether they know it, choose it, or even like it. Sound shapes your mood, your energy, and your consciousness, influencing your life and your decisions. But most of us have no idea of the impact of sound, because it lurks below conscious perception. Sound is like air: It's always around you, but you never think about it unless it's taken away.
That's really how a woman who learned to hear after twenty-nine years figures into this book. Sarah gained more than a sense of hearing. She's in the unique position of being able to describe eloquently what it was like to hear for the first time. You share more in common with Sarah than you might think.
You too can learn to hear the hidden world of sound that's influencing you every day. This awareness is like night-vision goggles for your ears. Once you turn it on, you'll see sound hard at work in all sorts of unexpected ways. Think about the motivating sounds of jingling coins in Las Vegas casinos. Or the sound of slot machines — kaching! — that we literally translate as "money." (By the way, studies have shown that the music and sounds of slot machines make people overestimate how much they're actually winning by as much as 24 percent.) The driving squawks of the Angry Birds and the satisfying crunch of wood and shattering of glass in the Bad Piggies' castles are a huge part of what makes the massively successful app so addictive. Those opening notes over the title credits are part of what make Star Wars more than a movie, and those two ominous bass notes from the Jaws theme are enough to make anyone think twice about swimming in the ocean. The Jaws theme, in fact, is a great example of a sonic logo (although describing it as one of the greatest motifs in film history would be equally appropriate). Those two repeating notes, building in speed and intensity, instantly call up a rich story and all of the emotions (especially fear) associated with it. It might even bring to mind the visual logo for the film, to which it is analogous. You'll often find the sonic logo of a brand at the ends of its ads (though if that's the only place you're hearing it, the brand is missing an opportunity).
Sonic logos are even more powerful when they're tied to anthems. An anthem is the long-form expression of a nation, a brand, a personal story, a movement, or a cause told in the language of sound. It expresses values in a sort of ownable sonic DNA. That DNA can then be used to make shorter sounds — sonic logos — that instantly and efficiently let listeners recall and understand rich stories.
You might not realize it, but you frequently make choices about the spaces you're in based on sound. You may prefer a seat in a corner of a restaurant because it's quieter, or seek out a loud bar because the noise makes you feel like you're part of an exciting scene. Next time you're in a mall or shopping district, listen to what you hear as you walk by each store. The smart businesses tailor their soundtracks the same way better stores tailor clothes. They've identified the values of their target consumers. You're well aware of how a company like the Gap represents those values in its visuals — the stacks of perfectly folded clothes, the clean, bright presentations, and the iconic logo (when the Gap tried to tinker with its logo in 2010, there was such an uproar that the chain quickly changed it back). The language of the Gap's music has to match the same values you see represented visually. It's on trend but never trendy, upbeat but never aggressive in a way that would offend anyone. Like the logo, the music speaks for the brand; you might not realize how much it matters unless it goes horribly wrong — imagine stepping into the Gap and being assaulted by speed metal or booming rap.
Other stores differentiate their brands with sound too, especially in a mall, where there's a different brand experience every fifty feet. You might hear orchestral music spilling out of Brooks Brothers or some kind of melodic metal or aggressive dubstep coming from Hot Topic. What story do the tunes tell you about each store's customers? Not just that they wear tan pants or guyliner; what does it say about who they are, what matters to them, what their lifestyles might be like? How do the sounds differentiate one store from another?
Now you're ready for the final challenge: How do these sounds make you feel? Do they make you feel anything? That's really at the heart of what I call a boom moment. It's the moment when sound pulls emotional triggers, the instant when sound sets off reactions not just in the parts of your brain that handle auditory stimuli but in the sections associated with memories, fear, joy, and even visual perception and physical sensation or movement. But you don't have to get the neuroscience or psychology or be wired up to an fMRI to understand a boom moment. You'll feel it when a sound makes you remember a certain time of your life or just makes you feel happy, sad, or scared. Or it might make you relate to someone or something — to envision yourself as a character in the story being told. It makes an otherwise ambiguous or meaningless scene, space, or object take on significance or value to you. You probably don't yet realize that it's sound making most of this happen, but the next time you find yourself moved by a gadget or an ad or a scene in a movie, think about whether it would be the same without sound. Try watching Jaws, Ocean's Eleven, or any James Bond film with the sound off. It's just not the same. Once you've learned to identify the way these boom moments work, you can start to see sound as a tool, just as Hollywood has for decades.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Sonic Boom"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Man Made Music, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Night-Vision Goggles for Your Ears,
The Boom Moment,
Sonic Landscapes,
The Principles of Sonic Branding,
Rethinking Possibilities,
Amplifying Messages,
Scoring the Experience,
Creating Boom Moments Every Day,
Hearing Around Corners,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,
About the Authors,
Footnotes,