Research & Technology

Audio technology has come a long way in a surprisingly short time, evolving from radio and television commercials into a whole new industry of interactive, highly sophisticated digital applications and synthetic soundscapes. In these episodes, we examine just how the market's continuing to change through guest interviews and discussions about the new technology that's leading the audio revolution, from cutting-edge voice conversion software and the online integration of sonic branding to scientific breakthroughs and the seismic cultural shifts that they can bring to the audio industry.

Voice Technology: Speaking Your Mind

Voice and sound interfaces are becoming an essential part of our daily lives. Whether they're smart speakers powered by voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, or smart cars, smart doorbells, and even smart refrigerators, our devices are listening to us, and we're interacting with them without ever having to look at a screen. The internet of things is being increasingly driven by sound, and these episodes feature interviews with technologists, developers, and industry leaders who help us take a closer look at the work going on behind the scenes to create a smooth and natural experience for the user.

Business Technology: Putting Sound to Work

The business world’s also adapting to the explosive growth of audio technology: when it comes to sonic branding and marketing, it really is a new world out there. We explore the shifting paradigms and new developments that sound technology has opened up, talking to business analysts and digital leaders who help us consider how early and strategic early adoption, and choosing the right technology platform for your brand, can help protect your data and create new opportunities.

The Architecture of Sound

Sound research isn’t just about inventing and improving the devices that create sound. It can also focus on the acoustics all around us, the natural and artificial soundscapes that we’re immersed in from one minute to the next. We also talk to researchers who are working to change the very backdrop of sound, from buildings constructed from the ground up with a specific resonance to hospitals that use new technology and design concepts to lower stress and help patients recover more quickly.

Keeping up with the science and technology behind audio branding can be a challenge, especially as new developments and discoveries seem to come each day. It’s a particularly exciting time for the sound industry, and these episodes offer a variety of stories and interviews to help you keep up with the latest research, and what it means for both the present and future of audio branding.

Podcasting By Numbers: An Interview with Jeff Vidler – Part 2

“Voice does communicate so much more meaning than what you can read. No matter how well written it is, it’s still the voice that really carries the meaning of the feeling of that, and you know as a voice actor how important that is and how much more it communicates.” Jeff Vidler This week’s the […]

Podcasting By Numbers: An Interview with Jeff Vidler – Part 1

“It’s a gift to listeners. If you make your podcast a gift to listeners, they’ll appreciate the fact that you gave them that gift and they’ll remember you for that and they’ll think better of you for that as a brand.” Jeff Vidler This week’s guest has remained at the forefront of changing audio landscape. […]

Music of the Spheres

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” At least not according to a certain famous movie tagline, and for the most part, it’s absolutely right. Sound as we know it travels as vibrating waves through matter, and there just isn’t enough of it in the vacuum of space to carry sound. But that doesn’t […]

Singing Blobs and Electric Melodies

Machine learning has helped shape just about every aspect of our digital lives, whether it’s deciding which Netflix show or YouTube video to recommend to us or even teaching cars to drive themselves. One of the most innovative uses for machine learning, however, is in creating music. Just recently Google released Blob Opera, a machine […]

Positive Vibes Only

Most of us grew up learning that the human body has five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Everything we know about the world around us comes to us through these senses. We see colors and we hear music. We taste whether our coffee has sugar in it and, especially now that we’re heading […]

A World of Living Sound

So much has changed about our world, from one century to the next, even from year to year. Just imagine taking someone even from the 1980s and dropping them into the world we live in right now, much less someone from a hundred or two hundred years ago. But all the way back through history, […]