Jodi Krangle

905 836 5444

Jodi@VoiceoversAndVocals.com

Audio Branding

Sounds of the Times

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Imagine you’re a child and you’re riding in the back seat of a car at night. You watch the trees passing by you through the window, and then you close your eyes so you can feel the vibrations through the seat. All the while the engine softly rumbles all around you, surrounding you like a blanket. Over half of parents surveyed said they’ve used “dream drives,” taking their children on a drive at night just to help them fall asleep. But what if you’re driving an electric vehicle? Would it still have that soothing rumble?

Last year Nissan partnered with Tom Middleton to find a way to preserve this timeless experience in the Nissan LEAF, an electric car that would normally be completely silent. To help the LEAF sound and feel more like an old-fashioned car, Middleton created an ambient album of combustion engine sounds called the “Nissan Leaf Dream Drive” that’s available on Spotify, Google Play and other platforms.

To learn more about it, just click the link below:
https://www.edelman.com/work/nissan-dream-drive

This isn’t the first time sounds have been added to electric vehicles to make them seem more familiar, and it won’t be the last. A new EU law mandates that by this July all hybrid and electric vehicles will need an “acoustic vehicle alert system” to make sure pedestrians can hear approaching vehicles. Those sounds are required to resemble a gasoline engine, and to scale up and down with the vehicle’s speed. A similar “quiet car” law will take effect in the United States this March, after a six-month extension.

Electric cars are just one example of how new technology is changing many of the sounds we take for granted, and how we’re working to bring those sounds back in new ways. You may have heard of the “coconut effect,” especially if you’re a fan of old westerns or a certain Monty Python movie. Whether it’s coconut shells clapping to imitate galloping horses, or the squealing tires during every car chase, or whirring, beeping computers, there are sounds in movies that we just expect to be there. It turns out that many of the sounds we take for granted in our lives work much the same way.
If you’ve ever had a cell phone call drop – and who hasn’t? – you could probably tell after just a second that the line’s dead. But how did you know? Though we don’t usually notice it, there’s a slight background hum added to digital telephones called a “comfort noise.” It’s only there when the line’s open, and when that hum stops we know that the call’s ended without even really thinking about it.

That hum was just a side effect for landline phones, but we’ve become so used to it that, even though modern phones don’t really need it, we’ve added it back in. Smartphones also do this with buttons that click when you press them, even though you’re just tapping a screen, while haptic feedback gives your hand a slight jolt with each click. It doesn’t need to do that, but it wouldn’t feel right for us if it didn’t. From rumbling vacuum cleaners and clicking car locks, from satellite radios with fake static to potato chips meant to crunch with each bite, a surprising number of sounds around us are intentionally designed to enhance our lives. For a closer look at some of them, check out this video:

As digital technology expands and replaces older, mechanical sounds with silence, it turns out that at least some of those background noises, whether it’s the rumble of a car engine or the hiss of a phone line, are still pretty useful. Sound remains an important part of our lives, and in many ways the audio industry is now working to replace and improve upon those missing sounds.

Most of us aren’t that comfortable with things being too quiet. Having those little clicks and hums all around us helps give the world context, and reassures us that everything’s still working even when nothing seems to be happening. Ambient soundtracks and background noise generators are becoming more popular these days; the link below discusses the difference between distracting noise and relaxing background sounds, and illustrates that subtle difference with a coffee shop ambience:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerator.php

While it often feels like we’re simply reacting to the sounds all around us, those sounds, more than ever before, are being molded to fit our needs and meet our expectations. As technology works to make our devices, our cars and even our homes quieter, we’re finding more freedom to fill them with the melody of our own lives.

Would you consider giving this podcast an honest review? You can do that here: https://lovethepodcast.com/audiobranding.  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/

Why is audio branding so important – especially now?

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What makes audio branding such an important component of your company identity – especially these days? This video takes a much longer interview with Audio Alchemist, Steve Keller (Sonic Strategy Director for Pandora) and abbreviates it into its most basic parts.

This discussion with Steve was fairly early on in the Audio Branding podcast’s history – but it remains one of the most important interviews I’ve had on the show to date (thank you, Steve!). Not just because he regularly blew my mind with his fun facts and stories – and not just because he had so much important information to share about how company identities need to think of their brand sound – but also because he explains it in such fundamental, easy-to-understand terms.

This hour and some odd interview was amalgamated into just over 6 minutes of wonder and information by the fantastic team at Podcasts Abbreviated – www.podcastsabbreviated.com .

This topic is IMPORTANT – and while it’s been out in the open a lot more than it has been in the past, it deserves even more discussion than it’s currently receiving.

For the full interviews with Steve on the Audio Branding Podcast, visit: 

https://voiceoversandvocals.com/blog/marketing/interview-with-steve-keller-part-1/

and

https://voiceoversandvocals.com/blog/marketing/interview-with-steve-keller-part-2/

And you can hear all the episodes of the Audio Branding Podcast at:

http://audiobrandingpodcast.com

If you’d considering giving the podcast an honest review, you can do that here: https://lovethepodcast.com/audiobranding.  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

Listening On The Go

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How are you listening to this podcast right now? Maybe you’re sitting at your computer or hearing it on a smart speaker, which probably means that you’re listening with one app while keeping busy with a few other things. You might also be using a tablet or an MP3 player, which lets you stay on the move while you’re hearing the show. But what’s really become popular over the past few years is listening on your phone. Just this past month, almost 24 million podcast listeners used their smartphones, compared to 17 million for everything else put together. One thing all these choices have in common is that they let you keep busy while you’re listening. And in today’s fast-paced world, digital audio, particularly podcasts and audiobooks, is becoming a cornerstone of our daily lives.

Multitasking isn’t always a good thing. We might feel like we’re being more productive when we multitask, but over the years studies have shown that we really do better when we’re focusing on just one task at a time. If you’re curious to find out just how well you multitask, here’s a link to a short test:

At the same time, audio does have some advantages of its own. Our brains are finely tuned to listening to each other, to hearing a speaker’s tone and pace, their inflections and the mood they’re expressing beneath their words. Reading is still a pretty new trick when it comes to our brains, which means written words might not connect as quickly or deeply as hearing them spoken aloud. And while reading lets us consider the words more carefully and go back over them more easily, digital audio leaves us free to keep working, to go running or driving, to live our lives while we’re listening.

Just recently I had Summurai founder Tal Florentin on the show, and his company is at the forefront of this digital audio revolution. Summurai is a content management service that takes written articles and condenses them into short audio snippets for people on the go. Here’s a link to a video with more information:

Even so, digital audio doesn’t leave much room for distraction. If you’re listening to a podcast on your way to work, that means you’re probably not listening to anything else right at that moment. This can make audio branding and advertising much more effective than other forms of online marketing; nearly 70% of podcast listeners report that podcast ads made them aware of new products and services. And that audience is quickly growing in the US: more than a hundred million Americans now listen to at least one podcast a month.

Audiobooks are also becoming more popular, with one in five Americans having listened to one within the past year. While the first vinyl book recordings were made in 1932, and the first books on tape released in 1975, the industry’s grown in ways that could hardly have been imagined back then. George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, for instance, has been adapted into an audiobook with a cast of 166 Hollywood actors, and last year an Audible adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman featured its own all-star cast. Audio dramas have also experienced a revival over the past few years, with authors penning exclusive works meant to be heard instead of read.

While the freedom to listen and multitask all at once might be a selling point for audio content, sound can create a more powerful connection than just one of convenience. The act of learning something new triggers the reward center in our brains, much the same way as eating our favorite food or winning a game. And storytelling isn’t just part of our history, it’s how most of us learned to read: we grew up listening to our parents and teachers read to us. Audio content can combine both these things together, teaching us new things in a way that connects with our deepest experiences.

Printed books and traditional radio certainly aren’t going away anytime soon, but digital audio has become the fastest growing sector in the publishing industry. Twenty million people started to listen to podcasts for the first time last year, and that number’s only going to keep growing. And as more and more people find themselves listening on the go, the opportunities to reach out to and engage with that emerging audience will keep growing with it.

Would you consider giving this podcast an honest review? You can do that here: https://lovethepodcast.com/audiobranding.  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/

Interview with Tal Florentin, Founder & CEO of Summurai – Part 2

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This is the 2nd part of my interview with Tal Florentin. In the first part of our interview, we discussed the background of Summurai and where businesses are starting to use more audio. In this second part, we switch our conversation to talk about other places where audio is being used so content can be relayed to its intended audience.

We discuss:

  • Audio being used to give instructions for things like pre-surgery
  • Using different audio for male versus female consumers
  • The struggle that comes up when working with businesses to use a less formal tone of voice
  • Asking what kind of shoes the company wants the voice actor to wear when speaking their script in order to determine the scale of casual to formal in their audio
  • It can be tricky to find the right voice to match the tone of the content
  • The need for their own unique platform to house the audio
  • When having both the written and audio versions of content makes the most sense
  • The first use of audio to relay content- the guided tour
  • The summarization of content and how it comes into play
  • The struggle of long audio versions of content (like an audiobook)
  • The benefits of microlearning
  • Using microlearning as a way to summarize content for someone the same way a friend might be able to if you were in person
  • Summaries of people’s expertise and how that helps
  • Using summies to help with the medical field for doctors to learn
  • Using summies to help the layman learn about concepts that are hard to understand if you’re not in that field
  • How hard it is to be natural on video, which makes it hard to connect with your audience
  • The similarity from video to audio and how hard it is to sound natural when doing voice acting
  • We connect better when we feel like we’re part of a conversation
  • Voice actors who have done in person acting sometimes struggle and will overdo it
  • Personal voice versus professional voice
  • Opting in to using the voice memo app because it sounds more natural
  • Natural communication sounds like people just saying what they need to say
  • More info on Summurai

 

If you want to find out more info about Tal or Summurai, visit:

Website: www.summurai.com 

Downloadable PDF: www.summurai.com/ebook

Audio version of the PDF: http://summur.ai/dTEDG

 

This episode was very skillfully made to sound beautiful by the talented Humberto Franco (http://www.humbertofranco.com/).

 

Would you consider reviewing the Audio Branding Podcast?  If so, here’s the Apple Podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/audio-branding/id1489042453  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

 

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/