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Sonic brand experience for Bentley Motors
10 May, 2009

Sonic brand experience for Bentley Motors

Bentley Motors asked us to create an audio experience for the Continental GT car.
We spent time at the factory & with the car and gained an insight into the brand, who drives a Bentley, how Bentley sees itself how we could retain the heritage of the brand through sound.

We were interviewed about the planning, process and the story behind how Bentley Motors Continental GT became an antique shop inside the car..

We are surrounded by sounds. Sounds that tell us what to do, tell us when something is dangerous, when something is working correctly, when its not. Much of this sonic information is absorbed subliminally, and taken for granted. In advertising and branding, sound is crucial yet it is nearly always overshadowed by visuals, which tend to hog the limelight. Yet companies are slowly beginning to realise how sound can play a part in building a brands image, how it can be used to build a subtle, emotive narrative. This is not in terms of jingles or melodies, which have long been recognised as powerful advertising tools, but in the sounds made by products themselves – it is the bong made by an Apple computer as it loads up, which signals the good health of the machine as well as being unmistakably branded, rather than the irritatingly jaunty Intel Pentium Processing tune, which is used merely to aid brand recognition.

I think that brands and their creative agencies are starting to get more open to the idea that sounds can be created, implemented and executed in a much more intelligent way, says sound designer Andrew Diey. The direction seems to be much more about how to incorporate a story – sounds that reflect product and its need to interact with the consumer from a functional point of view but also reflect the brands attitude.``

Dieys output is diverse, with his company, Radium, producing soundtracks for everything from video games to Bentley Motors. When explaining his ideas for how brands can begin using sound design more effectively, he distinguishes between sounds that are used to relay information – feedback sounds – and sounds that are used to evoke atmosphere or emotion. These categories begin to blur when sounds are branded – the noises become distinctly related to a particular product or company, yet still function effectively as tools to give feedback. What were trying to do is get away from things pinging and bleeping and add a little bit more subtlety to products, he says. It could be engineering the tone of a hairdryer so that the actual sound coming out is a pleasant, branded sound. This is the way things are going – everything is branded, everything is the brand experience.

In its recent work for Bentley, Radium was asked to design sounds to be used when the indicators are switched on and when the seatbelt is not secured properly. In creating them, Diey considered the entire brand. I thought long and hard about what sound world a Bentley car would be like, he explains. If you had to live in the Bentley world and everything was of the era, its the 1920s, 1930s.

It would all be mechanical, a post-Victorian mechanical world. Electricity was obviously around but clocks were ticking away, there werent digital surroundings. I wanted to create the sound world that was part of their world. My father is an antiques dealer and Id grown up around huge clocks and mechanisms. I thought it would be really nice when you go inside the car to feel youre walking into an antiques shop, because I know from going into my dads shop that the shop is alive with things ticking away and that antique-y feel. In creating the sound for the indicators, Diey embarked on a series of elaborate tests, experimenting with sounds from clocks and metronomes, as well as creating sounds using the car itself. I wanted to include some elements from the car in the recording, so we recorded everything that made a sound in the car.

We were in one of these workshops where they had block-mounted engines so we were spinning things and twisting and hitting things. The end sound is rich, incorporating the clock sounds yet also retaining a contemporary feel. There wasnt really much soul to the original indicator, he says. I think with sound, theres so much detail, there are so many incredible variables you can get in there. What I wanted to do was soften everything up, make it a bit more relaxed, less full-on. This level of attention to detail is particularly appropriate for the Bentley brand, which is associated with luxury and wealth. The Bentley project was about placing sounds inside a car, so its got an engineering strand to it, but its got this whole marketing side to it as well, which is about the brand, the brands position. continues Diey. Every aspect of the car is geared towards the clients experience with the brand, but also their perceptions of themselves. Because the Bentley driver is very much a person who has arrived.

Everything has to be luxury. The communication between Bentley as a brand and the driver is a very special sort of communication. Exploring the sound possibilities of a car is perhaps one of the more straightforward recordings Diey has undertaken, with previous jobs seeing him capturing the sounds of Challenger ii tanks and even jump-jet harriers. When questioned on what are the strangest situations hes found himself in when recording, he says simply all the bodily ones! and little explanation is required.

He sees recording genuine sounds as crucial to good sound design, however. Its such an important thing to have that real world source material. Its very similar to photography, where youre catching the light – with sound, youre catching the vibration.

Dieys work with feedback sounds is not only about brands. He is a member of an eu-funded research group which is looking into sonic interaction design, the use of sound as one of the principal channels to convey information, meaning and aesthetic or emotional qualities. This does take in the use of the sound in branding but also looks at how sound can be used to make our world more efficient. One of the reasons why this group exists is that theres quite a lot of information you can get from sound, he says. The applications are just phenomenal, from the stock market to mining for oil. Diey cites the use of sound in eg scans as an example, explaining that it could be used to help spot anomalies in a reading. It allows you to find the problems more quickly. Its about efficiency. Especially in the medical world, where you can use sound to give you the most minute feedback.``

Some of the sound methods that the group are exploring are unexpected. For example, the military, Diey explains, has already begun using the voices of family members instead of alarm sounds in equipment, because we have become so accustomed to tuning out the sounds that are annoying or intrusive, yet will immediately tune into the voices of those we love. I think sound is going to play such an important role in the next ten or 20 years, he says. Not just in entertainment and the alert systems and feedback sounds that are very brash, but in a very subtle way as well.

In our noise-cluttered world, the possibility of a subtler sonic landscape is a relief. However, with the diversity of brands will no doubt come a diversity of branded sounds too, with some likely to prove immensely grating. But before the worrying vision of an even more noise-polluted world sets in, Diey stresses that part of his ambition for our future sound world is that it will, in fact, be quieter. As a creative, my aspiration is to make the sonic world a much quieter place, he says. With sounds which are subtler, on-brand and more rewarding. CR - EW 2008

Radium in New Media Age March 2009
11 March, 2009


Creative Director Andrew Diey has written an article for publication New Media Age entitled: 'Digital agencies wake up to the power of sound in web advertising'.

The article covers sound within the emerging digital platform, and looks at how sound can be used within digital to help brands tell a story, express an emotion, and convey a narrative. It also looks at how Radium Audio creates soundmaps for implementing the sound into digital assets and then onto final execution.

New Media Age article

Radium now on Twitter
04 March, 2009


Radium Audio staff are excited to be chirping, and tweeting about sound design on Twitter! come and join us: Click Here We will be posting regular updates on creative processes, links we like, movies we find and anything that sounds great!

Radium Design Sounds for Vodafone Blackberry
26 November, 2008


London based sound design company Radium Audio Ltd design Vodafone BlackBerry Storm online.

Vodafone commissioned Dare Digital to launch their new Blackberry Storm phone and it was the task of Radium Audio Ltd to bring the sonic character of the phone to life.

Whizzing sonically on the new Vodafone microsite for the Blackberry Storm, is a collection of high octane sounds, explosive rollovers, thunderous swooshes, and minimal impacts, for a new product launch. The first ever clickable touch screen BlackBerry available on Vodafone with high speed mobile broadband network.

The Blackberry Storm has several key features; a High-Resolution screen, High Performance Sound, Responsive Touch Screen, and Integrated Messaging... So how would you design sound for these technological topics? Thanks to Dare Digital’s creative team who devised the concept and brought the character of the phone alive, our role was defined quite easily.

Think about power, energy, electricity, octane action, speed, impacting, and you start to build a sonic idea of what type of sounds would represent the phones personality, attitude, emotion and brand positioning...

The sounds we created were based on these as a starting point, with our desire to keep the soundscapes as bold as possible and the interface as minimally clean as we could.

The electricity sounds were layered from a previous recording session where we had recorded Tesla Coils built by a church minister in a church in the Midlands.. [no joke].

When creating sounds which have a wide dynamic range [low-mid-top] it is important to build each layer carefully, selecting bass sounds that will compliment the rest of the sound range... so that our electrical pulses on the site sound great on speakers with sub-bass as they do being played through our of laptop speakers. They cut through, make a statement - "I’m here, I’m Bold, I’m the new Blackberry Storm...

Anything but bleeps!
As the phone has a personality,it’s essential to use sound as a narrative to convey this. The interface sounds, clean, percussion sounds have reversed sections to give the impression of movement and slotting into place within the interface. We always like to give roll-over sounds a sense of physicality to them.

The background hums constantly, the interface magnetically slots back into place with force majure that crackles, sparks, and impacts, you begin to get an impression that your speakers are not going to be so forgiving.

To view the online site please visit: http://www.vodafone.co.uk/blackberrystorm

Radium Design Sounds for Harry Potter
06 August, 2008


When designing sounds for a high profile brand and popular entertainment star such as Harry Potter, its important to keep the sound elements as magical as possible.

This means using all the tricks in the book to gather as much source material and elements to make the world sound rich, interesting and of course exceptional.

Our involvement was to create the sound design for the new teaser website Harry Potter EA Site. Our task was to make all the elements on the teaser site work within the world that it is set. In this case its an imaginary potion room at Hogwarts, full of spells, a bubbling cauldron, roll overs, hidden easter eggs. Originally, the clip shows a small mouse who when disturbed runs from behind one of the many bottles within the room, however this mouse is now missing from the final site. - to listen to the Mouse

When we create sound for an imaginary world we look to keep the world as organic sounding as possible, this means that the material that we use to create each of the objects within the project, website, game trailer, or world sound interesting enough to be a bubbling cauldron, a spell, or a mouse for example. No matter how imaginary these elements are we always strive to create a realistic world.

We do this by recording real world objects, with different types of microphones, such as contact microphones which record, amplify and pick up the vibration of an object. The name contact comes from actually placing the microphone in contact with an object such as water pipes, washing machines, glass surface. The sound you can record from these objects are very details and very close.

Some of the larger sounds in the world, such as the bubbling cauldron and the potion room ambience are created by layering different sounds to create a detailed, spacious and active sound design layer which accompanies the cauldron and sets the scene within the website.

The cauldron is made up of lots of layered sounds, such as aqua lungs, lava flow, and a Jacuzzi recorded underwater. This again layered with bubbling thick soup, and wall paper paste being made to pop, by blowing bubbles through a tube.

The atmosphere of the potion room is created through using atmos tracks from various caves, old windy houses, and again rumbling from a contact microphone recording of the boiler at our old studio.

We created the mouse scurrying buy using spider monkey squeaks pitched, and the claws were from false nails on hard ceramic surfaces. We used tall glasses from Ikea to produce the sound of the bottles clanking and layered this with volume and reverb automation to produce the effect of the mouse scurrying away from location.

All in all a great project and fine execution of good sound design, which was approved by Warner Brothers, and our client Collective.

Harry Potter EA Site

http://radium-audio.com/img/blog/large/HarryPotter_ScreenBlog.jpg