News

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