Danielle Venne: How to Design Sound for a Brand
Danielle Venne dreams of household appliances that can sing to you. Images courtesy of Danielle Venne
The conversation with sonic designer Danielle Venne began by discussing the sound of a potato chip crunch. She has two clients both working on getting the sound just right. Questions abound: Does one sound too much like the rest? Does it really feel more like a granola bar sound? How can the name, texture, and shape of the chips inspire the right pitch?
It’s all part of the job for Venne, the EVP, Executive Music Producer and Director of Innovation at Made Music Studio — and Creative Lead for their Big Blue Music Group — whose clients include Frito-Lay, AT&T, HBO, Nissan, and American Express. Companies like these often come to Made Music when going through a rebrand and need their sound to compliment their graphics and create a meaningful brand experience. In addition to sonic logos, Venne has been behind the creation of sound design for completely new experiences like the sounds within the Virgin Hyperloop and the sound of EV models like the Nissan Leaf.
Venne, a musician herself who began playing at age five and later toured Europe and the U.S. with her band Cougar, discusses how sonic design works, what brands get right (and wrong) about their sound choices, and her dream project.
Tell us about sonic design. How does it work?
Sounds in products are going to tell us a few things. There has to be some level of intuition to the sound. With a car, does the sound feel like it's idling? Accelerating? Decelerating? Reversing? If it's an appliance does the sound tell me that it's powered up? It's powering down? The battery's dying? It has to communicate something intuitively and effectively. That's one side of it.
The other side is, Is it communicating something about the brand and the quality and style of the product or experience? Does a Nissan electric vehicle want to sound the same as a Chevy? If you are a brand manager for either of those companies, the answer is a vehement no, I do not want to sound like that competitor. And even better is that I would like my vehicle to reflect the values of the company, which gets into some pretty heavy stuff. These tiny sounds and products have to play dual roles. A brand expressing something about the brand or the quality of the product, and then also expressing something functional about what the product is doing and how you want people to react to it.
Can you walk us through a recent client project and share how you worked with them to create sounds that fulfilled both of those criteria?
iRobot, the sounds of its iconic Roomba vacuum cleaner. The Roomba is the closest thing we have to R2-D2 in our lives — except in this case we really need to understand what it is saying to us (ex: “I’m stuck,” “dust bin is full,” “battery low,” etc.). But of course the robot is going to be personified by the users, so the sounds that it makes have to reflect a certain personality with a broad appeal.
What's an example of gold standard sound design? And what do brands get wrong?
People talk about how Apple products always get it right. You don’t always hear them because they are seamlessly integrated into the experience.
Where people go wrong is not taking into account the frequency ranges that fatigue the ear. We once researched a remote control for a streaming platform to look at the sounds they used to navigate. Our initial reaction was that the sounds were exhausting.
We looked at the frequency of the sound and the pitch was around three to four Hertz, which is the audio spectrum where the baby cry exists. It’s sharp and piercing and puts you on alert when you’re trying to change the channel. Products that don’t take into account emotional responses present big challenges and don’t make the products enjoyable. The consumer might have a bad feeling about the product and not realize the sound triggered them.
How do you work with clients?
Our most successful clients realize they have needs for sound and a brand identity perspective. They want to create an experience, and they need sound as part of it. That's our best setup. On top of that, the client knows the sound will reflect the brand.
If you think about an electric vehicle, so much of the sound comes from the exterior of the car. If I was just designing the sound for safety's sake on the outside of the car, I'd make something loud and obnoxious. But the sound will affect my desire to buy it on a subconscious level, so I need to create a sound that is also aesthetically nice. The strategy and extra layers of creativity that we bring add value.
How do you evaluate the success of sonic design?
With our research partners at Sentient Decision Science, we use a methodology that tests for emotional response and that research tests subconscious reaction. People aren't being asked, Did you like the sound? Did you think the sound suggested innovation?
Instead, they take more of a game-ification approach that subconsciously tests for emotional reactions. Then we can look at this data set and say sound A versus sound B had a stronger emotional response for these four words: innovative, exciting, optimistic and futuristic. This research gives us the ability to prove sound’s effectiveness when it comes to creating meaningful emotional connections.
What is your starting point to coming up with ideas once you have a client brief?
When we first begin work with a client, we can’t start with the music. We have to start with an understanding of the brand, its audience, and the culture it exists in. To get to a short piece of music, you have to start with the widest lens possible.
You have a musical background. What skills make someone good at sonic design?
I have a background in classical music and jazz music. What we do is like miniature composition, so I bring an attention to detail, trained over many years, to sound design. On a musical level, I have help from sound engineers and mixers, as the work is not done in a vacuum.
Working in a band is sometimes not so different than leading a team of creative people. You have to know your role and understand other people's roles in a team and musical sense. If you think you can do everything in the band, you're probably the most annoying person in the band.
What type of project would you like to design sound for that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to design sounds for household appliances. My vision would be that if you invested into a brand’s ecosystem for your household appliances, your entire house could sing to you <3.
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