Hi and welcome to Sound Talks. My name is Khan Stin. I'm a sound designer and a member of the team here at Sonic Minds. Today we'll start by answering some of the questions that we get asked most frequently and cover some of the basics of the strategic use of sound. And today it's with our sonic leader Ken Kimps. Ken, do you want to maybe introduce yourself a bit maybe for some of our viewers that don't know who you are? Yeah, I can do shortly. My name is Casten and um I'm the founder of Sunny Mines and have been doing audio branding since 2004 now. So more than 20 years. Yeah. And your music background is I'm a drummer actually and my father was also a drummer and music has been my whole life. We're actually sitting in my childhood home here. Oh, really? And in these living rooms here, lots of jazz musicians and singers and musicians have been played and having fun. So, it's this house is for me the soul of music. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes it even better to sit here and do it. So, today we'll do a sort of Q&A or a frequently asked questions. So I've tried to find a lot of questions that we hear all the time and try to condense them down into five questions. The first one is what is Sonic branding and why is it important? Well, that's two questions. So actually it is two questions in one. Let me answer the first one. Sonic branding, audio branding, the same thing is to use sound and music strategically to create more engaging and effective communication. At least that is my definition of it. And that can be expressed in a short logo like you know for many brands McDonald's, Intel, Coca-Cola blah blah into whole audio design systems where there's a several different audio assets that together combines an audio identity. Yeah. So you can have an audio identity without having an audio logo, but you can also have an audio logo without having a full audio identity. So it's a um about using sound music the right way, not more music, but the right way to really create meaningful and I say meaningful communication because there's so much noise out there. And uh what is noise? So that's audio branding. And why is it important? Well, because as I said before, there's so much noise out there. I believe that just nowadays it's been become so cheap and easy to produce music either on stock or AI or whatever and have and it's so easy to deploy in social media products etc. But really to create this effectiveness and and wanting people to listen to you, you have to use sound music in the right way otherwise I will be pushed away. So it's very important today for every kinds of brands. I don't believe so much in B2B or B2C. I believe in human to human. So if you are a brand, I believe that you're no better than how you sound. If you say you want to be innovative and or modern etc. and you sound cheap and generic, then my brain get confused. So I hear this but you say you are this which one of those should you trust? And that's where I believe that we we choose as much with our ears because sounding music is the most fastest one of our senses. We can hear in 0.146 seconds we can recognize a sound. And so it goes beyond our rational thinking which also comes to words in our wording when we say h it doesn't sound right. What do you mean by sound? Is it the the tambra the harmonies? Well that doesn't feel right because something is wrong with it. So that's why it's so important today for all brands on their stakeholder communication on commercials, social media and um today many brands already have a real strong visual identity. So they know how to look and colors, fonts, uh you know templates etc. But in terms of sound it's still random. So it has been taken 40 years to come to the uh strength of visual density which we have today. All brands have a visual identity, have a logo, but still few brands have an audio identity and struggle of you know how should we sound today or tomorrow or what music should we use here and how is that combined with our app and how should that be transported into the phone system. So how do you create this cohesive audio design system that really makes it a meaningful user journey? That's also one of the ways I often describe it to my friends and people I meet who are like what what did you say you work with audio branding? What is that? I'm like so you know there's a visual identity a visual brain it's the same with audio that often triggers it for people be like ah but yeah the relevance of it is kind of difficult also to explain to people and that also leads onto our next question which is what does sound design for a company involve isn't it just choosing a background track and another version of that question which we also get often is what does it mean to have a custom Sonic identity versus just using a stock track. So what are your thoughts on that? Well, as I said before, many brands has a visual energy that's their own logo and you know their own visual identity with the fonts and colors and most of them also have some motion graphic to it. Yeah, that is not stock. I know I don't think you can find any serious company say let's go find some stock average logo and use that because then everybody else could use it. So how can you in terms of sound if you use the same music as everybody else you cannot own it and then you build a brand on a rented ground which you never be able to own. So it's very important for brands today to own their audio landscape as well because especially in digital world which most of us communicates in there's only two senses there hearing and seeing seeing is all done visuals logos fun colors yes brands are still struggling to own the red or the blue or the purple who who's that you know blue color agencies both the banks and insurance companies red one is that Coca-Cola is it another brand who owns the red color is it Ferrari is red etc But what about the sound? And those brands who already done this for many years like Coca-Cola, Intel, now also Instagram has it own logo, Tik Tok as well. So they don't just do it for fun, they do it also because of the money, but also due to the effectiveness it has. Because when you need to produce so much content daily or weekly, it's very consuming and resourceful consuming about discussing what sound should you use for this campaign, what do you think about this or should we have that sound over here? Well, they don't discuss that in terms of colors and fonts. That's why we have some templates and um that's why it's it's so important for them to to use sound as well. Yeah. And also actually that leads exactly into our third question because we hear a lot of this like uh what is the question is what is emotional sound branding and how does it influence our buying habits? So that's exactly what you're talking about like the emotional thing. Yeah, this is a big topic and sound of music is as I said earlier the language of our soul. I mean if you if you sing the national anthems uh football games you know Olympics all starts with you know n national anthems or the Olympic song or the Champions League song. It's all about the emotions you create. It creates this you know community of we are togetherness and uh because music is such a strong um tool for us as humans. We can hear before we are born. It's the first thing we hear. So it's the first sense that develops before we born and research shows that a a child can recognize the voice when it comes out from his from his mother and father because they have heard this sound inside the womb. It's also known to be the last sense we we lose when we die. So if you sit to a person who who's going to die, please keep talking to them or singing to them because you can always hear. We can never never close our eyes our ears and u the brands really understand that you know that sound of music is such a strong identifier for who you are. It's a it's an extension of your personality. Are you jazzy? Are you rock and roll? Are you country western? Are you hip-hop? Are you whatever? So it's a it's a strong identifier for your personality. And same goes as brand and that's where we you know we we connect with with people who like us. So if you and I went to the same concert with Bruno Mars or whatever pink then we are oh you also love that concert. Yes me too. Then we almost friends I don't see experience I've seen a fight on a concert because then we are on the same you know community we the fans to the same idol here. So we are on the same boat here. Yeah. Um, so it's such a strong community builder sound of music and it really it's an extension of the brand's soul and using generic sound if if I should add an angle to that is that if you just sound generic, you know, generic then who are you? Yeah. Then you're just random or nothing. So I think this in this age of of overflow with information, we also seeking for authenticity and authenticity can comes with handcrafted music and not AI necessarily. Not that I'm against AI, but still that's actually funny that you mentioned it. Make it makes just make music because we can and just prom I want this blah blah blah, but can I feel it? Does it touch me in some way? So we really seeking for that authenticity and really try to convert a brand into you know what is you want to sound and why and where should you use that and back to our philosophy you know when you do break the silence it must create more meaning than the silence itself otherwise you're just doing pollution or making noise and that's what my biggest ambition here is to really make the world sound better product by product brand by brand I don't want to be the that you know here's car with noises and music in all products and brands all over the world. No, no, I want to really just like now some kind of space. Yeah. And have more conscious more Yeah. consciousness about how we should use sound and our voices in our communication in the product you're buying. You know, the TV you turn on every day or the blender you pushing the coffee machine to the unhopers you call to a company. Take responsibility of your auto landscape. We have all these, you know, pollution policies and the CO2 friendly and whatever. What about audio pollution? I mean, come on. It's also stressing people. People die from audio pollution and get stressed, you know. So, yeah, like you sometimes you get into a totally new car and you get so stressed out, but all information sounds or just walk into a restaurant and hear, "Oh, I just want a cup of coffee and a sandwich. This is not me." I go out again. That's also why I think that we see so many people wearing anti- noise cancellations in the public spaces in commuting traffics. Yeah, I do that myself all the time. Why do we do that? Also bicycle because there's so much beep. Uh but I also feel that with the new e-cars, the pollution is getting better but also less noise in the streets. Um but I think there's some kind of connection this is my own philosophy between all the um stress to young people and people make you know uh diagnosis and due to all this inputs of you know screens blinking music here sound here in every store you know why do we need that so just because we can't have a sound in an in in some kind of content or a store doesn't necessarily mean we have to it has to create value in the context otherwise we're just adding noise. So that's important for me to say even though we we try to make a business of making music well it is a silence that is the background. So we always have that in mind. Could you tell me a bit more about the your thoughts on the artificial intelligence because that's actually my fourth question because people ask us this a lot like do you use uh artificial intelligence at Sonic Mines? Uh, and we're like, "No, of course we don't." Because like you said before, it's supposed to be authentic and it's supposed to have soul. So, what are your thoughts on like what does sonic branding look like in the age of artificial intelligence? Yeah, it's it's a good question, Khan. And, um, I always been, you know, interested in new trends and technologies. Me being a drummer back in the 80s, the drum machine came out, you know. Yeah. And then and then they became better better. We have samples and then all drummers say, "What should drummers do?" Now we have, you know, drumming samples. And who should why should we even play drums when they when the sample can play on time every beat, but it's just it's a tool. And nowadays, we see all pop music, they have where they have, you know, use the the um the drum machines and samplers as tools to play on top of. Yeah. So I see AI as a tool for creativity, not the solution. It's just a new tool. It has always been that in the music industry. Then came the vocalizer, then came the you know the samplers, then come the autotune, then came whatever. Um but AI of course is a is a huge step into yeah creativity production. It will make in few years it will make films and probably make better music that I can do. But it's all trained on us. And um perhaps I will re revisit this question in 5 years when I hear some music where where I can't hear the difference between is it AI made or human crafted. But right now the test we see that if you ask a person who listens to an AI voice or AI music and say which one of these two you prefer say well I think I like them equal or this one better. Then afterwards I say if I tell you then that this one here is made by AI then what? Well then I like this one better. So perhaps it will change over the years when we are more more used to having AI speaks and AI generated avatars and and watching movies with that. But I still think that people are connected to emotions which is made with synchronicity. I I can feel you right now. I can touch you. I can smell you. But if you're a robot Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't shower. If you're a robot, I wouldn't I wouldn't have that connection with you because it's all about the human connection. And actually there was also one one um company who asked us I mean do you do you only do AI or do you AI music? So well AI is a tool we try to craft ourselves. Ah that's good because we really want some some some soul some something made with the with the heart of an artist not only by AI. So I do think that make it short AI is a tool not the solution. And uh right now the last thing I want to say about AI is right now you cannot trademark or own own a sound made by AI. So if you are a company and you only produce AI music, how can it's going to be generic because you cannot own it. You cannot trademark you cannot license it because it's made by AI. Yeah. Yeah. So again, yeah, it's but I definitely I don't think this is the last time I get this question. And in one year a new solution came out and right now there's lawsuits. All the major labels are suing all these AI companies. I don't know where it's going to end. I don't think anyone knows. But definitely it is a game changer, a huge game changer. But um me as musician, I would still prefer to listen to concert with flaws and human errors playing rather have a perfect concert with an avatar scene playing that's not interested. You know, perfect isn't interesting. Actually, uh I only have one question left now, but what I just heard you talk a lot about was also the like a sonic consistency because now we touched a lot of different like there's UI or UX which is uh user experience to our viewers who don't necessarily know that but there's also the Sonic identity. What is like for a brand or for a company if we're looking into this then what is sonic consistency and why why is it vital? Good question. It raised very much that companies today have a much more complex user journey and the products also more intelligent. Let's say for instance a um a a car company or a headphone company. They both have an app. So the user journey for a car perhaps starts on the app where you see how much power is on the car should have reheated before go or when does it need service. All the new ecars are like this or if you are a electronic manufacturing company you set up your headset device via the app first. So for a user you don't only have a product the product is also uh connected IoT internet u it's connected to the internet. So suddenly you can also um communicate it with from different devices and that means that if you have one sound in the app a different sound in the product and then you have different music or whatever sound design in other brand touch points then I get confused. So also for companies who have several products within the same category. It could be a kitchen applying company where you have coffee machine, toaster, fridge, they use the same logo, the same icons for power on, power off or different, you know, visual icons which we know. So it's about distressing the the brain for you know you shouldn't be being in doubt of is this power on, logo up, is this power off, is this up or down and the same with sound. So we have different products that have different UI user interaction sounds. Then you get confused. Was this battery low or was this power on or is this really was it power on or am I or I'm driving too fast or was this I'm out of fuel. What was it? So it's really about you know d-stressing people by making consistency and um make it easy for for for users to understand the sounds. So when we're working with UI sounds, there's actually two tracks here. There's the aesthetic part. Do you want to sound soft and round and airy or or or you want to be square and and secure and strong and masculine? That's one thing. That's the aesthetics part that expresses your brand um personality but also functionality. Do understand this is you know power on or power off or up or down. And that's where we do some um we have very a lot of um experience in creating these audio um design systems and audio framework so people can intuitive understand this means that a new powerful phone or this means it was shut down or this means transfer completed transferring money. For instance, the bank sector is also has been reduced to an app. In the old days before you were born and when you were a child you walk into the bank and you talk to a human said I want to withdraw some money and you pass some money and then here you go and you got now you have this left in your account here today it's all an app so you don't you you don't feel the the customer support of the person you might had a relationship to the own bank um in terms of of personality but today it's just an app so all this huge functionality and personality has produced into an app and if it looks visually deluded or sounds you know uncertain or sounds cheap then it is a cheap brand or bank. So that's very much important for products today because you interact with the bank daily via the app you have to use your coffee machine daily or your car daily. So all these brands that have a product that users are using daily suddenly the UI sounds becoming so important because we don't watch flow TV anymore. We don't go in actively watch a YouTube film about this bank. Oh, this is sounds good. Now I'm going to call them up. No, you are perhaps you know getting hit on a social media platform or some kind of commercial. So it's the whole user journey that needs to create trust and trust comes with consistency and repetition and that's also why they use the same logo. brands have discovered that, you know, same logo on the buses or the campaigns or the social media. What about the sound? Yeah. And if you only have two centers, you know, you really had to capsize that and also create effective communication. I think that's a great way to end our conversation today. Thank you so much for wanting to answer some of the questions we get asked a lot here at Pleasure and I'll happy to answer some more questions. Let's do that next time. Thank you.