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With sound cards now pre-installed in every computer, there's no reason for your website not to have sound, but how do you choose the right one?
Auditory phenomena -- sounds -- have long been a forgotten part of web design. Back when the web first appeared, most computers didn't even have sound cards. Now that rich media and RIA (rich internet applications) exist, sound is making a comeback.
Here are some do's and don'ts for designers incorporating sound into brand websites.
Sound events
Sound events are the equivalent of auditory flashbulbs. They stop us and catch us. We can usually identify them pretty easily and for any number of reasons. Here is the key, though. People can identify sound events easily based on factors like culture, history, environment and education. For example, I can easily determine what farm machinery is being used without seeing it because I spent most of my early years on farms. There are people who can tell who is coming up the stairs in their apartment building by the sound of the footfall.
These factors are critically important because a sound event in the San Francisco Asian community might be meaningless noise in Boston's North End, a primarily Italian community, and vice versa. Sound events are very much like language specific idioms: intuitively understood by some and complete mysteries to others.
Let me give you some examples of sound events. See if you can determine what they are.
Sound event #1 is water trickling and #2 is a lion. Sound event #1 is identifiable by most people due to the predominance of water on the planet and #2, if not a lion, might have been interpreted as a large jungle cat or predator of some kind. And anybody who has attended eMetrics knows #3, Jim Sterne's baritone voice. Very good!
Some research indicates that the sound of running water is one of the most soothing sounds humans hear, and some designers have decided to use it on their websites.
I cannot discourage you enough from doing this. Trickling water as a soothing sound is culturally specific; in one website I saw that the particular water sound being used was modulated and frequenced to activate very specific aspects of the auditory neural complex.
God forbid you associate a website's brand with the sound of water trickling in the bathroom!
The moral?
Never, ever, ever use a ubiquitous sound event with a brand. You'll have absolutely no control over when the sound event triggers a memory of the brand. Unless you're willing to take that risk, better to stay away from it completely.
The lion's roar, however, is a wonderful sound event for Northern Hemisphere-based cultures because -- and I'll admit I'm guessing at this one -- not a lot of people in the Northern Hemisphere have actually been chased by a large predator animal. Also, such sounds usually imply power, strength, life, energy... all positive cognitive, behavioral/effective and motivational attributes.
A slight modification of the lion's roar that is familiar to most people born in the United States and over 35 years of age is Tony the Tiger's "They're greeEAATTT!" This sound event is so closely tied to a brand it leads us to our next topic.
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