99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-15- Sounds of the Artificial World

Episode Date: February 11, 2011

Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its sounds are designed correctly, it creates a special “theater of the mind” that users completely … Continue reading →

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and it's really confusing. You're lost immediately. Did I get it? No, I didn't get it. The number is there, but I didn't hear it. I used to get it physically with the rotary. S for sound. This whole world is artificial. When I started, I was working with this guy at the Advanced Product Group at Apple.

Sss sound. And he had a case for a walk man, I think, and he opened it up, and he closed it, and you heard it, click. And he said, somebody worked really hard to make that click sound that way. Walk man's laid in high school. That was an acoustical element on a mechanical device.

Well, there aren't a lot of moving parts and mechanical bits in today's devices, but Jim McKee still has to make them sound right. My name is Jim McKee, and I have a company called Earwax Productions. We do sound for film, radio, internet, and product sound design. Quite simply, a product sound designer looks at a product and thinks, what kind of sound should this thing make when it does a particular thing? So typically, what I do is I create a bunch of button sounds.

These are would-be buttons for a Yahoo widget. Say, okay, you guys tell me which ones are the closest and then you end up with what 38 sounds here. I love that. I could listen to that all day. In fact, let's hear it again. Oh yeah. The best sounds are not completely synthesized. They come from the everyday world. My top drawer, my dresser drawer at home, over the years I've been collecting all these little things.

You know, just I would like, oh cool amarble and I would leave it there all at. Oh cool is this little tiny Chinese ceramic bowl or you know some kind of funky clip and I realized that all these things are very kind of intimate to me very close to me but they make sounds and the one cool one was dropping a small marble into this China bowl and it has a dynamic to it which everybody's familiar with it bounces but then it bounce with mep on bounce bounce. That's the marble sped up and compressed and e-cute and who knows what all sorts of things. Actually, the funniest one, the one that everybody loved and it seems to have stuck more less across the board is the sound of a vice grip opening up because it's got the click in the spring and for some reason

it just it really works and people like the way it sounds. I think you can hear almost the same sound when you plug in your iPhone. They get powered. You know that. Oh no, when you turn it on. Here it is. Oh yeah, I do. If the device and it sounds are designed correctly, it creates a special theater of the mind that you completely buy into. Electronic things feel mechanical. It's the feeling of movement, texture, and articulation where none exists. On Jim McKee's most recent phone project, the sounds that worked best were the ones you

felt. Resonating quality of the sound, in relationship to the chassis itself, is what sold it. It's like, oh, that feels... that really feels like it's part of this thing. And once you find those frequencies that resonate in a device, you keep exploring that space. Almost got to the point where I didn't even have to ask them which one they were going to select because I would give them, typically I would give them half a dozen, once to pick from varying and volume, varying slightly in pitch, and I go, okay, it's going to be 46 B. And they come back and go, I don't know why, but that seems to work a lot better.

You take any actor and put them in a room, and they're immediately going to find the size of the room with their voice, right? It's just human nature, and so why can't we expect the same thing out of our devices? You know, it needs to feel like it's indigenous to this piece of plastic. 99% invisible with produce by me, Roman Mars with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, in the Center for Architecture and Design, to find out more, put in 99%Invisible.org.