Sound Design for the User Interface in Multimedia Consumer Products

Jeff Essex, Creative Director of audiosyncrasy, gave a talk to the San Francisco chapter at the Dolby Theater in mid-May. His presentation covered design issues related to developing audio for user interfaces (UI) in devices such as network music players, set-top boxes, and toys. Thirty-nine people attended.

Essex’s first task when beginning a UI project is to discuss design issues with the producer. These include branding as well as "sound and feel" topics. The product design goals could range from a stylized or high tech image to a "warm and fuzzy" feel and often these choices suggest what type of audio to incorporate, e.g. computer blips or natural, warm sounds.

Learning the technical constraints of the project is the next task. Essex tries to meet with the hardware and software designers as early as possible during the project to learn how things such as ICs, memory sizes, buffering schemes, audio compression, latency, number of channels, menuing or programming flow, and user interface controls will constrain his approach to creating sound effects for the product. For example, one of his projects was a toy talking globe that was limited to extremely compressed audio samples. Essex had to make aggressive use of hard limiting and EQ to make the speech intelligible.

Several factors influence the choice of sounds for a UI. For example, cues can be provided via simple musical chords. Happy sounds are often associated with major chords and sad sounds are denoted by minor chords. Dissonance and consonance can be used to evoke tension and resolution. Mimicking speech tonality ("uh-oh") can also provide hooks to get the user’s attention. Other issues to consider include the listening environment (e.g., cell phone vs. home theater), matching the UI volume against the main audio content, and bracketing the frequency spectrum of the UI audio to make it more discernible. An example of the latter is combining a thump (low frequency) with a click (high frequency) to ensure that the UI sound will be heard against a movie trailer.

Essex remarked that the rapid evolution of consumer electronics products and lack of standards and formats make his job interesting, yet challenging.

Thomas Merklein