99% Invisible - 148- The Sizzle

Episode Date: January 14, 2015

The first trademark for a sound in the United States was issued in 1978 to NBC for their chimes. MGM has a sound trademark for their roaring lion, as does 20th Century Fox for their trumpet fanfare. Harley Davidson tried to trademark the sound … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's really hard to get a sound trademark. The first one in the US was issued in 1978 to NBC for their times. MGM has one for their roaring lion. As does 20th century Fox. That's 99PI's own Katie Mangle. After a year's of litigation, they finally withdrew their application. So if a bunch of burly bikers can't do it, it must be really hard.

Right now, there are fewer than 200 active trademarks for sounds, even though sound can be super important to brand. Just ask these guys. My name is Joel Beckerman, and I'm Tyler Gray. Tyler and I wrote a book called The Sonic Boom, How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. Here's a sound that would be, like, impossible to trademark. But Tyler and Joel say it was crucial to building up the brand it's associated with. Oh man, I know that sound. I know it so well.

When I was just a little kid on a cul-de-sac, they built a chillies in my town. This was before there were really chain restaurants where I lived, so chiles actually felt kind of novel and exotic. My family was pumped and our favorite thing to order is fajitas. They don't really sell the steak, they sell the sizzle. In their book Joel and Tyler used chiles and their sizzling fajitas as an opening example to illustrate why companies should think more about sound. You're sitting in a chiles at the dinner hour at 5 o'clock and let's say at first nobody's ordering the sizzling fajitas, but then maybe about 20 minutes, 30 minutes into the dinner hour and I've seen this. All of a sudden one person orders sizzling fajitas.

As the server brings out the sizzling skillet of fajita, meat and onions. And you hear that sizzling sound literally every eye, every single person in that restaurant. Their head turns to the server, walking past them, and they follow that server with their eyes, and then they smell the burnt onions, and now you're hooked. And now everyone orders a sizzling fajita. And in the back, instead of making that one order, they make 15. Yeah, they call it the fajita effect. My family fell victim to the fajita effect too many times to remember.

We may even have initiated the original fajita effect, patient zero of the fajita effect. Chili's, by the way, did not original fajita effect, patient zero of the fajita effect. Chilis, by the way, did not invent fajita. That distinction goes to a Texan by the name of Sonny Falcone. He was selling a subpar cut a meat called the Faha and figured that if you cooked it out in the open with a lot of spice, people didn't care about the quality of the meat. It got to chilis because Larry Levine… Larry Levine was the founder of the meat. It got to Chili's because Larry Levine... Larry Levine was the founder of Chili's. Had seen restaurants around the Rio Grande Valley

sort of do their version of it. He had the idea to make sound the star of the show. And so when Chili's opened up, they put that sound of sizzling fajitas in their first-ever commercial. fajitas sold like crazy. In the wake of their massive success, Chili's printed up t-shirts for staff that said,

I survived the summer of Fahida madness. Now they serve enough fajita meat to fill two nuclear submarines a year. I really hope someone filled two nuclear submarines with fajita meat to get that measurement. Tyler and Joel say it's surprisingly difficult to get people, even really creative people, to think about sound, to value it in the same way they value the visual environment. But sometimes there's one person who gets it. At Apple Computers, one of those people was a guy by the name of Jim Reeks. Hi, my name is Jim Reeks.

I am the only person you know whose name is a complete sentence. Jim worked at Apple for about 10 years starting in the late 80s. We didn't really have titles. I don't even think I had business cards. Well, whatever his title was, Jim was working on sound for the Macintosh computers. Which was a neglected stepchild of all things Mac. No one really cared about the sound until the end, which is unfortunately typical. Except Jim. He's a composer and a musician, and he understood the importance of sound more than most of his colleagues. And Jim had strong feelings about the startup sound that was on the Mac at the time. I just hated it. I just could not stand it.

Here's what it sounded like. Here is a couple more times because it goes by really fast. So when Apple first started up, it was, you know, the computer was far from perfect. It crashed a lot. And every time you turned it back on, you heard that jolting sound. So Jim set out to make a better one. You're Mac just crashed. Again. You've lost your work. Again. You're waiting for this thing to boot up. Again. That's the audience. Just a bunch of pissed off, frustrated people who are super annoyed and you're wasting their time.

That's a hard audience to play too. I got to change everyone's mood, so I was thinking a zan-like, meditative sound, similar to a gong, or chanting own. Of course, we're all familiar with the sound he came up with. Oh that's nice. So much better right? Only problem was Jim asked for permission to put this new sound into the prototype for the new Mac and... I was told I couldn't do it. We already have a sound, you're not allowed to change it, it was just on and on and on. But Jim knew the people who were responsible for building the prototype.

I played it for them and then they liked it and so when no one was around, we put it into the build and the Quadro 700 shipped with the sound in it. That was back in 1991 when the Quadra 700 Mac costs $6,000. Jim says he never got any props for the sound. Just grief. And yet, that sound with a few minor tweaks has been the Apple startup sound ever since. So I think we can assume that Steve Jobs liked it. It's this big giant two-handed C-Cord, C-Major Cord,

that makes you kind of feel welcome to this very stable, very substantial world of Apple. It's probably the single most connected sound with the Apple brand. And brand is just the experience or a perception prior to the experience. So everything that shapes the perception matters, you know, like imagine a really beautiful car that just had this horrible engine always backfiring. Actually, there are people who make sure that beautiful cars sound beautiful, or at least that they sound right. One of them is Sean Carney.

Hi, my name is Sean Carney. I'm a Mustang Power Train Sound Quality Engineer for Ford. Sean works on Mustangs, and there are all kinds of things he and his team can tweak to get the sound they're looking for. There's different tubes inside, but the exhaust gases will flow through, and those tubes have different shapes and different preparations, and only a different whole pattern. It's sort of like an instrument. Kind of like you can control the sound of a horn by placing your fingers over different holes. Sean can control the sound of the Mustang.

And it's an easier job for the standard V8. But then sometimes they'll put out a specialty Mustang. In 2008, Mustang decided to put out a remake of a Mustang that appeared in the movie Bullet in 1968. In the movie, there's a pretty famous chase sequence where Steve McQueen drives his Mustang all over the streets of San Francisco. Mustang all over the streets of San Francisco.

Sean and his team wanted to make the 2008 bullet sound similar to the 1968 bullet. So when it comes to a car and it's about an old car from old movie. So yeah, we're trying to make that specific car to be too in a way and it's drawing you back into those old memories. It's almost like that folklore of what that car might have been. They're trying essentially to make a new car sound old, which is challenging because cars made in 1968 were built completely differently. That engine had a carburetor, we used a fuel injection system, and all of the things, they completely changed how the engine can sound.

Sean was never going to be able to duplicate the sound of the bullet car from the movie exactly. For one, the Mustang in the movie was enhanced, with sounds recorded from a race car. And apart from that, it's actually illegal in most places to drive around in a car that loud. So a big part of what we try to do is we try to identify what are those key characteristics and what are the notes that are being played by that classic American V8 sound that's in the movie.

When the reviews of the bullet Mustang came out, people talked about the sound. And most people thought Sean and his team had gotten it right. Here's the 2008 bullet Mustang in action. Sound is actually in terms of all of our senses, it's the one we react to quickest, it's even quicker than touch. That's Joel Beckerman again. Brands that are not paying attention to this, not paying attention to sound and association with experiences,

they're really going to get punished. Case in point, in 2010, Frito Leigh decided to come out with a new, biodegradable, sun chips bag. Only problem was, they never considered what that packaging sounded like. Here's a YouTube video, someone made about the bag. Only problem was they never considered what that packaging sounded like. Here's a YouTube video someone made about the bag. Delicious sun chips love all your products. Think that I cannot get over. Is the noise that this bag makes? I don't know what it's made out of. If you ever wanted to get like this one little chip out of the bag. And actually, you know, and I usually can't even. You want to get one chip out of this bag. Good luck.

That guy on YouTube was not the only person to notice how noisy the bag was. Someone created a Facebook page called, sorry, I can't hear you over this sun chips bag, and it got 40,000 likes, and it became a national news story. They had to pull the new bag and go back to the old back. Good intentions, bad execution.

Joel and Tyler refer to this kind of sound as a sonic trash. You know, you'd never let somebody take a bunch of trash and throw it in your front lawn. But we allow cities, our neighbors, brands to really invade our sonic space. It dump garbage in your ear. Essentially. Essentially.

Joule and Tyler, imagine a world where all the sounds we hear have more thought behind them, more intention. It would be very rare that you would actually hear the sound that something made. That thing would trigger a better sound. In Tyler's world, they could make the sun chips bag sound like this when it's open. Every time you get a chip, you're like, Yeah, except that sound. It's actually on that very short list of trademark sounds.

So hands off. Whatever. Whatever. 99% Invisible With Produces Week by Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan, Avery, Truppleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW and San Francisco introduced of the offices of Oxon, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. I hope when I die, there's a button on my tombstone and you can press it and it would play the sound. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook,

I tweet at Roman Mars, we also have a cool tumbler and a Spotify playlist that will provide a nice soundtrack to your workday. But I encourage you to explore the entire world of 99% invisible at 99pi.org. Radio to be out. From PRX. PRX.