The Sound of Experience Design
Leveraging the psychological effects of music, silence and noise
“Music is the shorthand of emotion.”
Leo Tolstoy
Imagine you are in a small concert hall to hear a string quartet playing Johann Sebastian Bach. The audience is silent and respectful. The air is suffused with the sweet sound of violins and cellos. How are you feeling? Calm? Relaxed? Contemplative?
Now imagine you are in a stadium for a rock concert. The venue is massive, the crowd is in the tens of thousands, everyone cheering and screaming and hooting at the top of their lungs as the band comes on stage. Then comes a wall of sound as big as the stadium itself. How are you feeling? Energized? Awestruck? Ready for anything?
Finally, imagine you are standing next to a construction site at a busy downtown intersection. It’s mid-day, the sidewalks are full of people rushing this way and that. The streets are jammed with cars, trucks and buses, horns honking and sirens blaring. The ground trembles under the ceaseless pounding of jackhammers. You can barely hear yourself think. How are you feeling? Stressed? Irritated? Overwhelmed?
We cannot underestimate the role that sound plays in the human experience. When it comes to designing that experience, sound must be as carefully curated as content or ambience. Sound design can be used to manage energy and arousal levels, regulate emotions, enhance the persuasive power of a presenter, improve knowledge retention and extend the time an audience is willing to spend in with you before tuning out.
A Unified Soundscape
Sound design is not just knowing what music to use at your event, it includes both noise management and other sounds. Everything needs to be coordinated and in balance. Sustained exposure to noise can ead to fatigue, diminished focus and negative outcomes. Choice of music can elevate mood, increase attention, express your brand personality or cause distraction. Then we have silence, a powerful tool that either has the potential to provide important moments of respite or awkward gaps in a presentation.
A soundscape is the creation of a custom combination of sounds (noise, music, sound effects, and silence) for use throughout various zones in an event.
A poorly designed soundscape can cause mental fatigue. It can cause people to spend less time in the environment you have created. It can diminish their understanding of your content or increase their likelihood of missing your message. And ultimately it can make them feel less satisfied with the overall experience.
We need to think about how the integration of noise, music and silence can be used to create a single, unified soundscape. With an effectively designed soundscape we can increase the amount of time spent in areas where the most investment was made. We can improve attention for key presentations, announcements, or workshops. And we can help attendees enjoy and remember their experience with us.
The Benefits of a Well-designed Soundscape:
Manage Energy & Arousal Levels
Improve Mood and Event Enjoyment
Improve Content Retention
Educate and Inform More Effectively
Extend Time Spent in Environments
Improve Attendee Satisfaction with the Environment
Zone Optimization
An event doesn’t just happen on the main stage. An event happens in different zones. Some are designed for presentation, some for workshops, some for breaks in the action. You want people to respond to these zones in different ways.
Creating a customized soundscape means that you are strategically selecting the sounds (noise, music, sound effects, and silence) that best enhance each of these zones within your event. Understanding the goals, objectives and desired behaviors within each event zone and how they work towards a common outcome will improve overall engagement, retention, and minimize cognitive fatigue.
Think of your event as if it were a shopping mall. The music you hear in the common areas of a mall is always different from the music heard in individual stores. The mall music slows you down, regulates your fatigue and provides restorative moments because let’s face it, shopping can tire you out.
The store, on the other hand, hypes you up and gets your adrenaline flowing. It wants you in a state of excitement. A store like Abercrombie & Fitch, aimed at 18 year-olds, tends to play Top 40, House or Hip Hop. And it tends to be loud enough to drown out polite conversation. They don’t want you talking to your friends; they want their products talking to you. When you leave, you need the neutralizing effect of the mall music to help you forget what you just experienced and to prepare you for the next store visit.
When creating a zone, it is also important to consider context. Imagine dining in a Classic Italian restaurant with red & white tablecloths, Italian flags and images of Italy. Meanwhile a Mariachi band is playing traditional Mexican music. Your brain has difficulty aligning what it is seeing (Italian) and what it is hearing (Mexican), and it begins to question this discrepancy.
Our brains often run on autopilot, but when we encounter these kinds of unexpected stimuli (sights and sounds) our brain thrusts us into the driver’s seat so that we can understand the situation. We ask questions like: “What music am I hearing?” or “Why are they playing THAT music in THIS restaurant? Is it an accident?”. Manually processing unexpected sounds like this requires a lot of mental effort, which fatigues our audience and causes frustration. That’s why it’s important to choose music that matches the context.
The Structure of a Soundscape
When it comes to creating a soundscape, we are basically dealing with the integration of three ingredients: music, noise and silence. Effectively orchestrating all three is the key to success. Let’s consider each ingredient in order.
1. MUSIC
Over 30 years of experimental research has linked the sound of music to greater pleasure and satisfaction ratings (Roschk, Loureiro, & Breitsohl, 2017). Research suggests that music can increase customers’ intentions to buy products and evaluate event spaces more favorably (ibid.). The right music and audio cues within an environment can generate positive emotions and inspire positive evaluations of the event or environment where music is heard.
For example, consider the results of a collaborative study by Sonos and Apple Music. They carried out a global survey of 30,000 individuals and a field study of music (vs. no music) in 20 different homes.
They found that music improves mood. When music is played, people are:
12 % less jittery
24 % less irritable
25 % more inspired
19 % more enthusiastic
It’s clear that music is an important part of our lives and has a profound effect on our state of mind. Think of how some music just automatically makes you tap your toes. Or motivates you to get up and dance. Or how listening to music while you work helps sustain you through the execution of mundane tasks.
So, how do you select the right music for your event? That depends on the response you are hoping to elicit from attendees and your overall objectives for the event. Let’s consider a few key components.
TEMPO
Researchers say the right tempo (pace or speed of a piece) is key. Research shows that higher BPM (beats per minute) is associated with significantly better mood (Stewart & Koh, 2017). As an obvious example, drum-and-bass-driven music running between 150-180 BPM is going to inspire a more upbeat mood than the blues at 60-90 BPM.
Given the research example noted above, it’s generally wise to gravitate towards higher BPM. In areas such as entranceways, where the only purpose of the space is to excite and inspire the audience, it is most effective to play high tempo music. But, this doesn’t mean that this kind of music is suitable for every area. Its important to match the music type to the environment to balance emotional arousal over time.
EMOTIONAL AROUSAL
Music has the ability to alter our mood and mindset. Think of how music enhances the experience of a movie. It can put you on the edge of your seat (chase scenes and battle scenes), scare the dickens out of you (suspenseful scenes), give you a nice warm feeling (love scenes) or make you laugh (comedic scenes). Without music, all of these effects are somewhat diminished.
It’s important to remember that along with a soundtrack that plays higher tempo songs, you need to include occasional low energy beats to avoid overstimulating the audience. If possible, like a shopping mall, designate particular areas such as rest areas to be a constant source of slow, relaxing music. Then, attendees can self-regulate their emotional arousal by seeking out these areas as needed- and you can keep the tempo up in other areas to increase positive mood for everyone else.
MUSIC TYPE
The choice between instrumental music and music with voice and lyrics is significant. Lyrics have been known to be more distracting as they carry semantic information (i.e. meaning). For example, it’s harder to concentrate when someone is talking over your shoulder, vs. something like the sound of a fan, which you can quickly and easily tune out.
Generally, different tasks call for different types of music. For simple repetitive tasks, upbeat music with lyrics that make you happy are most effective. But for complex, problem solving tasks, or for learning something new, silence or familiar instrumental music is most appropriate. That’s because when we are using a lot of mental energy to process new or complex information, such as during a demo or educational talk, we don’t have much mental energy left to process background music and distractions. In these situations, lyrical music and background speech are very distracting and interfere with learning (Vasilev, Kirkby, & Angele 2018).
2. NOISE
Noise is known to negatively affect speech comprehension, impairing our ability to learn and understand content. Noise induces feelings of stress, impairs memory, and increases symptoms of fatigue (Jahncke et al., 2011).
Noise in an event environment can be anything from the hum of an HVAC system, to background speech in an adjoining room, or the sudden “bangs” “honks” and other negative sounds that we encounter on a regular basis.
Sustained, excessive noise causes the release of the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline). In low amounts these hormones are beneficial for memory, but in high amounts they impair the storage and consolidation of recent experiences (Cahill & McGaugh, 1998).
As mentioned above, noise within your event environment needs to be properly managed. As background noise increases, additional cognitive effort is required to process speech (Brown & Strand 2018). Noise can act as a non-specific biologic stressor that is able to elicit reactions that prepare the body for fight or flight (Reybrouck, Podlipniak, & Welch, 2019).
There are ways to absorb noise so as not to distract attention or activate these responses. Noise absorption enhances content absorption. The more plush, soft objects in a room the less noise can travel. Lining walls with curtains and using thick carpet isn’t just cosmetic – it’s an aid to engagement.
3. SILENCE
Silence is essential. By doing nothing, something is created: peace of mind and focus. Particularly in areas such as busy expo environments, silence removes external stressors from an environment and improves the attendee experience.
Don’t underestimate the art of doing nothing – we know that taking a break improves mood and attention, which allows attendees to better engage with content. Carving out space for attendees to unwind in sound-free environments is essential, rather than jamming in as much content as possible.
Even an “awkward” silence can be effective. When a speaker has a long, drawn-out pause the audience is placed in an aroused state as they anxiously await the next few words. In this state, we are more open to the highly attention-grabbing stimulus, the speaker’s amplified voice, and more likely to ignore less relevant stimuli such as fidgeting in the audience (Sutherland & Mather, 2018). Thus, a drawn-out pause both eliminates distraction by using the absence of sound and drives attention to the speaker using an emotionally arousing situation.
Conclusion
Sound is immensely powerful and we must consider its context and qualities as well as the overall soundscape of an event to ensure it is contributing to the event’s success and is appropriately aligned with individual, unique functions.
Music expresses emotions, adds colour to stories and gives life to words – it’s like a sound track to an experience that triggers a memory, causing you to reflect and reminisce. This is the kind of impact you want to have on your event attendees. The right music will help you leave a positive and lasting impression.
Noise needs to be carefully managed. The more unexpected and unpredictable a noise is, the more difficult (and tiring) it is to ignore. It steals the energy that your brain needs to focus and comprehend what’s being presented.
Silence, as they say, is golden. It is an indispensable component of any event design, a necessary restorative element for people who have been immersed in an information packed, energized environment for several hours.
A careful balance of those three components of sound is key to a successful event design.
