News
Digital agencies wake up to the power of sound.
19 February, 2010

Digital agencies wake up to the power of sound.

Andrew Diey, creative director, Radium Audio

“People don’t just watch, they listen and watch. Sound design is the narrative that underpins the story”

According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished by the gods and condemned to push a rock up a hill only to watch it roll down again and having to repeat the same action. Until recently, working in sound design has felt like this. We’ve created great assets and then handed them over to digital agencies, only to hear results that were not as we intended them to be. Luckily, things are changing.

Sound design is a craft that’s part of several key industries, from movies, broadcast, manufacturing and entertainment to digital advertising. For example, over the past ten years we’ve created sound effects for many game development titles, which means we’ve created sounds that work within a digital environment that’s interactive.

People don’t just watch, they listen and watch, and with this combination comes music and sound. Music is the emotive experience which sets the tone, lifts the spirits and guides the audience towards a feeling. Sound design is the narrative that underpins the story.

Digital agencies are now becoming more adventurous and confident with making sound design an integral part of the creative, be it Flash pages, mobile apps, online games or banners. But this can be where things fall down. The creative part of sound design is only 50% of the job. The remainder is implementation: slotting the sounds into the assets and making them work as the designer intended.

When working with agencies we use soundmaps — flowcharts of where the sounds will fit within the Flash build, how they will play, looping, non-looping, single shot and so on. These also contain the information regarding the sound volume mix within the build and how each sound should be balanced within the digital ad.

Mapping out the sounds in a visual form also gives everyone input to the assets to be created, from a creative, financial or technical aspect. We also sit with agency technical teams during the Flash build so we can oversee content being placed in situ and make quick creative decisions based on what’s working.

Enlightened agencies understand the future of audio within the digital sector plays a very significant part of telling a brand’s story online. You can engage the audience on a much deeper level using sound. As digital creatives wake up to this, we can focus on implementing great sound design online, rather than repeating previous mistakes. Unlike poor old Sisyphus.

What we have learned in our 3 year history
17 February, 2010

What we have learned in our 3 year history

Every brand tells a story. Capturing and articulating that story is our goal as a creative team.
From the tiniest pin drop to the biggest sound...the most moving piece of music...voiceover or sonic ident...each project is crafted with that story at its heart.

Music is emotion, and sound design is a narrative. The advertising experience is 50% visual and 50% sound. We go beyond this and believe that music and sound has the ability to reach people on a human level which is all about emotion.

Where would we be without sound? Would we still be able to feel emotive watching scenes in a film, laugh out loud, connect with the voiceover message, understand the subtext in what we are seeing and feel something in response?

Radium is a company with this ethos as its core. People dont just watch. They listen and watch.

With this in mind we work towards digging out the story, unearthing the authentic attitude and personality of a brand.

Each brand does have a soul, each brand does have something to say. To ignore sound for the brand, film, animation, logo or online presence, is like cutting the umbilical chord which will connect your story to the very core of the viewers soul.

People do like to connect and people do know what moves them. Where would the world be without the ability to connect to each other, to share our spirituality and common humanity?

So, in our 3 years as a creative company, what we have learned is this.

Brands, Pictures, digital, products and moving images can tell a story without sound. We all know a picture tells a thousand stories.. and if we were data processing machines that would be quite sufficient.

However when you consciously choose to let the authentic soul of the visual story be articulated in sound, you can indeed communicate with the viewer on an emotional level which visuals alone cannot achieve. ...

We are human and we want to be loved, just like everyone else.
So share your love, passion, spirit and soul of your brand and connect with people on a human level.

In short, do it with sound & music.

Check out our work for Ferrari, Universal, Rolex, Bentley, Mercedes, 24, LG to hear how sound does capture and articulate the soul of the brand.

Thank you.

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!