Imagine you’ve finished shopping. Then, just as you’re getting ready to leave, the chip reader shrieks at you to remove your credit card. No matter how pleasant the shopping experience was or how nice the checkout person, the last thing you’ll hear before exiting the store is that grating noise—a sound that, statically speaking, affects your subconscious as negatively as nails on a chalkboard. It’s a great example of what we call “sonic trash”: sounds that are unpleasant, emotionally distressing, and degrading to everyday experiences.
This one outlines the importance of sound design through a study of the influence of sound in experiences, per their results:
We found an 86 percent correlation between how sound makes people feel at the subconscious level and their conscious desire to have or avoid that experience in the future.
As more brands are reaching users through smart assistants, in different contexts - home, cars, phones- leaving users with a pleasurable/memorable experience becomes more important every day. To which
the article concludes:
The clear takeaway for brand and product designers is that sound can create or destroy value, depending on how effectively it’s used.
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