An invitation to speak at a TEDxWWF forum in Geneva, the first TED conference to be hosted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has led to an unusually creative consultancy project. Michael Spencer (MD, Sound Strategies) will be talking about the natural world and its aural environment – and how many sounds are threatened with extinction along with the species and natural habitats that make them.

Life in pre-industrial environments was much more dependent on sound (and smell) for communication…and indeed survival. All the more so before we were able to write or use referential language. By way of contrast, urban cacophony has the effect of reducing the richness of meaning in sounds, as more and more information-poor sounds crowd into our aural space.

With these thoughts in mind, we began compiling an audio library of animal cries and other natural sounds to amplify the point of the talk. The languages of animals (especially birds and sea mammals), taken together, are probably richer by an order of hundreds than all the human spoken languages put together. Qualities unique to each species represent a repertoire of unique sounds unequalled even by all the music in the world. Of course, animals rarely achieve the subtleties of meaning embodied in human speech however their calls are unfailingly precise, direct and impossible to misinterpret by others of the same species.

To give some idea of the huge variety of calls, we created three specific ‘Soundscape Symphonies’, each one evocative of a different habitat region: Polar Regions, Temperate Plains, Woods and Mountains, and Tropical Forests. The three tracks will be interspersed between conference sessions at the TEDxWWF.

The idea was to create a celebratory cocktail of sounds devoted to each habitat which would have an overall evocative or ‘musical’ effect, rather than an environmentally catalogue of specifically contextual sounds. Fantasy landscapes populated by improbable animal companions have been a feature of painting for centuries, but only in recent years has it been technically feasible to do the same with sounds.

So we have a Himalayan marmot duetting with a bald eagle and Ethiopian wolves arguing with a Japanese macaque. In sampling all of these animal cries (thanks of course to numerous scientific and government internet-based resources) we were struck by the similarities of very basic emotions no matter what the species: fear, anger and mating calls all seem to have similar emotional effects on us as humans, even if we don’t know the animal source.

So our soundscape symphonies aim to ‘play’ with not only the beauty of the sounds themselves, but the implied communication behind them. We tried to create (as in a human musical symphony) a discernible emotional journey, underpinned by appropriate background ambiances of forests, mountains or oceans.

And of course an important point is to remind people how important sounds are in relations to natural and species preservation. Many research studies attest to the beneficial effects on our psyche of natural sounds and sights. Even for those whose lives are exclusively lived in an urban environment, the sounds of wild birds and animals which seem to manage to penetrate even the noisiest city never fail to evoke positive emotions. They have an uncanny ability to connect us with the rest of the universe, no matter where or when we hear them.

More Links:
TEDxWWF Website
TEDxWWF One Planet Living
TEDxWWF Global
TEDxWWF on Twitter

Andrew Peggie

We were delighted to be asked to contribute to the Balmond Studio’s newsletter recently.  Cecil Balmond is deputy chairman of Arup and has been credited with being the engineer for some of architecture’s most influential structures.  He is currently working with Anish Kapoor on the iconic structure for the Olympic Park; the Orbit.

This article was the outcome of a conference in which we participated at the invitation of the University of Duisberg-Essen.  It concerned the interface between organisational theory, avant garde jazz and architectural patterning theory.  You can see the article in context here.

Patterns, music and architecture

It was only recently that I became aware of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language.  I was invited to speak at a conference in Zollverein in the Ruhr Valley at the invitation of the organisational development department of the University of Duisberg-Essen.   As with many business schools there is an almost constant search under way to find relevant metaphors for improving business practices.

This conference marked a three-year research project exploring the links between innovation in organisations and the processes of freely improvised jazz.

Working across disciplines is both rewarding and stimulating.  Similarities are amplified, unexpected synergies give deeper insights, and differences provoke new perspectives. For example, working with a visual artist in Tokyo recently it was illuminating to consider the subtle reversal of the use of negative space as a visual framing device in parallel with the different polarities of sound and silence in music.

For the researchers, insights came when they introduced pattern language, and for me this provoked two observations.

The first is that the essential building blocks of music are patterns.  Rhythm, scales, melodies, structures – all contain patterns which may be implicit or explicit.

At its most fundamental level music concerns the relationship between time and frequency.  It’s from these two elements, underpinned by a constant pattern of pulse, that rhythm is created.  Rhythms and the implicit metre within which they sit (2 beats, 3 beats, 4 beats etc.) are characterised by periodic patterns, and community activities such as social dancing would not function without them. In the 14th century, because of the absence of a fully functioning system of notation such as we use today, one method of co-ordinating separate and simultaneous lines of plainchant arrangements was by the use of repeated isorythmic patterns.

Melodies are created from the application of rhythm to a systematised pattern of pitches known as scales or modes.  Harmony is created from the patterns of intervals that make up chords.   In turn these elements support musical architectures – blues, first movement form, popular song formats, fugue etc. All of these familiar structures because of their frequent application.

My second observation came from the intersection at which the structural processes of contemporary jazz and performance practice meet, and were a consequence of listening to the music of the jazz vibraphone virtuoso Christopher Dell who had participated in the original research project.

The neuro-scientists tell us how much the brain appreciates repetition, although it is the disruption of this which maintains our interest. One way of looking at music is that it is in some ways an exercise in the management of expectation and how this balances around the fulcrum of repetition and disruption.

Patterns seem to play an integral part in the spontaneous structuring of jazz, however they are highly nuanced, and can be applied in a fashion that makes the music sound random and sometimes unintelligible.  The detection of patterns somehow makes the listening experience easier to comprehend.  As with chaos theory, however, the identification of the axes that reveal recurring patterns may not always be immediate and lie deep within the overall structure.

In his ‘New Theory for Urban Design’ Alexander suggests, “…every new act of construction must create a continuous structure of wholes around itself”.  This is certainly an apt description for musical improvisation.  And, his proposal that all ‘building’ is intertwined with human activity resonates strongly across the entire spectrum of performance, whether improvised or not.

July and August were particularly busy times for Sound Strategies.  Just when the rest of the world seemed to be focussing on summer vacations we were gearing up for an eclectic mix of a activities around the globe.

Our regular long-term commitment is to Japan.  This year was given added poignancy by the incidents that took place in March.  We were speaking at a branding event in Switzerland when news of the earthquake was announced and it couldn’t have made for a more chilling comparison to watch the tsunami approach in real time whilst talking on Skype with friends and colleagues in the Tohoku region.

On returning to the UK we helped set up Play for Japan, an organisation helping to co-ordinate and promote fund-raising events.  Google were kind enough to give us a video channel and it proved to be one of our most effective promotional tools.  Particularly helpful was an interview given to us by Lord Melvyn Bragg.

Through Play for Japan we were able to forge links between orchestras and the NPO Living Dreams, which is spearheading work in the orphanages.  We ran their first joint music project with children from the affected region, and it looks as if things are well in place for continuing into the future.

The rest of our work involved conferences and workshops throughout Japan.  It was inspiring to collaborate with the Mori Bijutsukan (Mori Art Museum) in a project that took place in the heart of their Marcel Duchamp Prize ‘French Window’ Exhibition looking out across Tokyo from the 52^nd floor.  We finished the trip at the National Training Centre for Fuji Electric and worked with a large group of their engineers on a programme designed to stimulate ideas for the development of new products.

Prior to Japan we participated in an intriguing conference held by the University of Duisberg-Essen in the spectacular industrial mining complex of Zollverein; now a European Heritage site.  They have been overseeing a 3-year research project looking at organisational complexity through the lense of avant-garde jazz and architectural patterning theory.  Leading practitioners, academics and industrialists from around the world participated, and it was a particular joy to work alongside the jazz vibraphone virtuoso Christopher Dell.

Immediately following Japan we passed through Lausanne in order to speak at the Lac Leman Communications and Leadership Conference, held by the Università Svizzera italiana where we spoke about the hidden internal functional dynamics of orchestras which drive them to become high performing teams.

September will see us in Shanghai working in collaboration with Creativity at Work and BASF and the year’s travel plans, so far, will close with a visit to Geneva to speak at the invitation of the World Wildlife Fund for their first International TEDx conference.

So, time soon to start planning for next year’s travels.

Music isn’t (just) a language

A phrase to beware of: ‘Music is a universal language’. It usually gets trotted out by someone at a particularly inspirational moment when it appears as if the whole world is dancing to the same tune – usually a Western rock classic. One rather dubious variant on the theme implies that everyone, anywhere, will instinctively appreciate music based on the European tonal harmonies of melody, chords, bass. The ‘universal language’ theory, however, can be sorely tested when the same person is faced with a particularly complex qawwali improvisation, a neatly turned tee-hi or an enigmatic kouta. Place our universalist in a full blast thrash metal gig and the theory rapidly disintegrates altogether.

Music operates largely at socio-cultural levels. It enhances both the inclusion and exclusion aspects of tribal behaviour, and even if certain iconic elements can be found in almost every musical culture, their existence is largely obscured by the socio-cultural associations surrounding the music in question. Punk rock is musically pretty basic and not difficult to analyse in purely technical terms, but its nihilistic anti-social message ensures that it would never be included in the pantheon of big ‘universal language’ tunes.

The intricacies of how music can operate simultaneously on several different levels – symbolic, iconic, rhetorical, Pavlovian – tend to be lost on the average advertising or marketing specialist. With the consequence that their musical choices, when it comes to putting it to use as a marketing tool, can be largely hit or miss. The fact is that creatives rarely have the knowledge or awareness to tap into the psychodynamics of sound in the same way that they instinctively take into account established research on visual and textual semiotics.

But it’s also true that, although research into how music affects us is multiplying monthly, there have been few attempts so far to pull together the various disparate strands in a way that might benefit a hard pressed ad agency. Philip Ball is a science writer whose latest book, The Music Instinct (Bodley Head), is as clear an explanation you will currently find, managing to derive truly universal conclusions from a global study of music in all cultures. It thus avoids the Euro-centric bias often found in other attempts to explain music’s workings. But, like every writer about music that ever existed, he soon becomes entangled in the difficulties of describing what we hear, unable to proceed without recourse to conventional musical technical language. And of course he stops short of considering music merely as a marketing tool.

So – in anticipation of Sound Strategies’ own Guide to Making Music Work for You – here is a snippet to whet the appetite: effective music works by establishing a delicate balance between the expected and the unexpected. It teases you into paying attention, simultaneously feeding the need for confirmation and the appetite for novelty. It’s a form of rational addiction.

Andrew Peggie

Did you know that…

… there are around 25 different ways that music can function in a film or video? Understanding these puts you at an advantage when it comes to creating commercials that excel. Ignore the ways that music can function effectively and you might find yourself asking the question: why did it fail?

Maximising the use of sound in a TV commercial means knowing about what it can and cannot do just as much as knowing which style of music track to use. Most people assume (understandably) that a music track should somehow amplify or confirm the visual or verbal content of a commercial. However, music is often at its most effective in performing a contrasting or ‘framing’ role.

Pastoral music warbling gently behind an idyllic country scene for example may support what we can already see on the screen, but there is no tension, no drama, therefore no emotional pull. Place the same music behind a scene of devastation and the emotional temperature is immediately heightened by the tension between the visual and aural elements. It doesn’t take specialist musical expertise to understand this. What is important is to have a clear grasp of the creative function of each element of the video: dialogue, voice-over, image, character, soundtrack, etc.

Speech, text and image are important transmitters of semantic information. Music cannot do this and indeed studies show that the emotional undertow of music can be distracting when the principal aim is getting facts across in the space of a few seconds. But music can generate pace and urgency behind a voice-over so long as its melodic or harmonic content does not create an alternative aural focus.

Ensuring the right music is doing the right job for a commercial means thinking about it at the beginning of the creative process. Because one thing is certain: music as an afterthought associates that value to the product, and ultimately the consumer.

Andrew Peggie

A salutary tale

Few companies appear to be pro-active about the media potential of their websites. Of course there are many examples of flashy flash animations and cinematic videos, but they are invented by and large by website designers with probably only the vaguest of creative briefs from the client company. Or they are simply imported from a TV campaign.

Nestlé, however, appear to have taken an in-house decision about sound on their corporate website. On a number of pages they have taken the trouble to embed a simple audio player which automatically reads the text of the article featured on that page. Nothing new in principal, but it’s encouraging to come across a global brand thinking more imaginatively about their web presence. This is not the same as a podcast created purely in the audio medium, but an attempt to provide an alternative platform for the same written content. Screen readers are commonly used by people with visual impairments and they are available with the Microsoft Office package, but Nestlé are possibly unique in embedding the software.

There are two sides to the screen reader, however. On the positive side, updating textual content does not require separate updating for the audio. Thus documents can easily be changed or amended on the relevant page without having to be concerned about audio files. On the negative side, not only does a digital voice sound odd, but it signals a lack of authenticity which can seriously undermine a brand image. The ‘female’ voice, in fact, makes Nestlé sound like cheap fairground automaton. And this is perhaps more damaging than the frequent mis-pronunciation of numbers and technical terms. No-one at Nestlé, it seems, bothered to listen to the result.

So if there’s a moral to the story, it is that good intentions are never quite enough where sound is concerned. It’s always better to take advice in advance. Or perhaps just to listen more attentively.

Andrew Peggie

Days after studying a recent paper by Warren Brodsky, Director of Music Science Research at Ben-Gurion University, I came across by chance a paper by scientists at the University of California who were investigating the potential for suggestibility between sniffer dogs and their handlers. Brodsky’s paper investigates the ability of consumers to detect positive relationships between a brand and music specially commissioned to advertise the brand. Well, not so much the brand itself, but a set of ‘design language’ statements established to inform all aspects of the marketing – a sort of evocative briefing document.

Brodsky’s work is important in that it aims to establish stronger criteria for creating a marketing campaign in which the musical elements actually match the overall brand message. He writes in the abstract to the paper: ‘Manufacturers, marketing agencies, and researchers of consumer studies have handled music in a haphazard fashion. Music is often captive to financial resources, political agendas, or lack of know-how; choices rarely reflect criteria attributable to the brand. Linking music to a brand or product is a liability, as consumers’ impressions can be manipulated by incongruent music, causing brand image to shift.’ All sentiments Sound Strategies would agree with, and his paper is a welcome endorsement of our aim to promote better briefing and strategic planning in relation to music and audio in advertising.

But it also demonstrates the pitfalls in adopting a reductive approach to music-brand association. One of these was thrown into relief thanks to my encounter with the dog handling research. Domestic animals are known to develop hypersensitive responses to the behaviour of their human companions. The University of California researchers found that the dog handlers’ beliefs about the presence and location of a hidden drug strongly influenced the behaviour of the dogs themselves during the test searches. The handlers were led to believe that drugs were present in the test locations, but in fact there was nothing except the occasional appetising sausage. When the supposed locations were indicated to the handlers, the dogs were much more likely to identify what the handlers thought was the correct location though there were no drugs to sniff out. With the sausages, even more so! The dogs were simply responding to tiny behavioural signals from their handlers – or to the smell of a potential lunch.

So how much inherent suggestibility was there in Brodsky’s experiment to establish whether consumers can distinguish between brand-fit music and incongruent music? The experiment went a long way to try and eliminate researcher influence, but by reducing the measurable elements to a limited choice of simple, basic musical parameters, an absence of ambiguity and a vague awareness of Western musical conventions was all that was needed to guide the test subjects towards the ‘right’ responses. They just followed the sausages.

Of course suggestibility plays a large part in the action of advertising media on brand attributes. Indeed, the whole concept of a brand attribute is based on more or less credible suggestibility, with metaphor and imagery playing a large part. However, nuance, subtlety and ambiguity – the very stuff of any artform – are clearly anathema to a process which requires simplicity, directness and maximum appeal.

Brodsky chose two current American automobile models (a Cadillac and a Chevrolet) and began by creating a music brief which matched a series of existing consumer profiles for each brand with a set of musical expression parameters derived from the work of researchers Rentfrow and Gosling (2003), who have aligned certain musical styles and characteristics with personality traits – itself a rather questionable reductionist exercise. ‘

Next, 20 music clips were commissioned from an established commercial music production studio, based on the brief generated above: 9 for the Chevrolet, 8 for the Cadillac and 3 intentionally neutral in concept. The audio clips were then scrutinised by other music professionals in order to establish a small number of ‘best fit’ tracks to match the brand design language brief. There was a reasonably high degree of agreement about the resulting 5 selected tracks.

Already one can see the increasing convergence of the process. The music is obliged to match the consumer profiles attributed to each brand, in ways which make generalised assumptions about both the consumer tastes and the kinds of music which might be appropriate. The possibility of imaginative but unpredictable solutions is all but eliminated, as is the possibility of music contributions which might enrich the brand image in unexpected ways. When the five chosen tracks were tested with groups of potential customers, a significant degree of correlation with the two automobile models was obtained, but all the quirky or unpredictable outcomes had already been eliminated, so the choices available made it highly likely that subjects would choose the ‘correct’ tracks to match the brands. Such a reductive process is almost always going to provide positive results.

Then I listened to the music clips which were used in the tests, four each for the Cadillac and the Chevrolet. Outside the confines of laboratory conditions I was immediately struck by the inappropriateness of all the tracks in relation to the brands in question. Not because the musical elements presented didn’t indeed reflect the design language, but because the overall sound – the musical end-product – screamed low production values. Cheap synthesized instrument imitations, small combos, desultory drum tracks. I heard tuneless new age, 1960s cocktail bars, US sitcom title tracks, bland corporate anthems, a cheap West Indies holiday commercial. By reducing the music to a literal collection of lowest common denominator elements, all aesthetic and thus emotional functions were effectively eliminated. The music was no longer functioning as music, but merely as an audio reflection of certain generalised emotions and expressions – basic symbolic content.

Anyone actually hearing these clips in relation to the high quality images of the automobile brands would immediately write off either the brands or the music, or both. There was simply no credible tie-in between the visual representation of the cars and the aural experience. And though the music was specially composed strictly to the design language brief, the results had almost no distinctive musical qualities: there was no richness of texture, no musical subtext or distinguishing characteristics, no ‘personality’. It sounded like cheap pastiche – indeed that’s exactly what it was.

Does this invalidate the entire experiment? Probably not, since it did establish that consumers can make a theoretical connection between certain musical symbols and associated descriptive language – ‘design language’ – aimed at encapsulating the essence of a brand. But then, good commercial composers already know that. Their job is not simply to meet a brief, but to interpret it in a way which makes musical sense, and which contributes originality and uniqueness to the brand image.

It is very easy to become overly focussed on one’s own situation particularly when budgets are threatened by funding and sponsorship cutbacks.  The current pressures being felt by orchestras are however part of a global retrenchment of arts funding and it is useful to see how others are facing this challenge.

At the end of October I was invited to speak at the First National Congress of Spanish Orchestras in Madrid held by AEOS.  The topic was ‘The Symphony Orchestra in the 21st Century’.  As a result of the global recession Spain’s economy has become one of the most vulnerable in the international community, and along with every other commercial enterprise orchestras are concerned about their future.

Spain has a relatively short orchestral legacy with most of them being formed only in the last 25 years.  The majority also receive the bulk of their funding from local or national government and traditionally this has given them a degree of stability.  The orchestras are, however, concerned about the way this might change as budgets become tighter.  In the current situation no organisation can afford to be complacent about  funding arrangements no matter how well entrenched they may appear to be.  Showing some foresight, the purpose of the Congress was to bring orchestras together as a unified body to create a pre-emptive platform for discussion.

The topics ranged from marketing and fund-raising to press and media relations.  A particular focus however, was education and community programmes.  These were seen by all as fundamental to the creation of viable and sustainable survival strategies.  Speakers came from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Association of British Orchestras, the National Orchestra of Portugal, and some of the Spanish performance venues.  I was invited to speak as an independent consultant.

From the presentations and discussions which followed there were three things in particular that struck me.

The first was that there was common agreement on the importance of education programmes as a means of advocating the work of an orchestra across a broad constituency; at one end students, at the other sponsors.  They were viewed also as being integral to an orchestra’s overall positioning and promotion, and that they should therefore synergise closely with the marketing and sponsorship departments.

The second was the similarity of each speaker’s presentation both in the method of articulation and content.  There seemed little by way of differentiation that distinguished one orchestra’s programme from another.  Each seemed almost exclusively to confine their programme to the engagement of young people.  And the educational level at which this connection was made seemed to focus more on entertainment value than pedagogical rigour.

This leads to my third point.  Because the cultural context in which each educational programme was delivered was different this would imply a comparative diversity in approach.  Therefore it seems strange that the style and content of each presentation was so similar.   Education programmes have to be responsive to the communities within which they sit and consequently should carry their own unique ‘thumbprint’.  This may mean, for example, that for some orchestras school students may not be a primary strategic focus.  Perhaps older people or people with disability may be more appropriate.

The purpose of this congress was to investigate practices elsewhere in the world and explore their potential for creating more sustainable offerings.  The ultimate aim, however, is to put  something in motion that is relevant to Spain.  This means having the courage to look at other organisations and learn from their failings as well as from their successes.

This article first appeared in the Magazine of the Musician’s Union of Japan

It has definitely been the open season for conferences.  And what a variety.  We spoke on topics ranging from architecture to orchestras, from London to Madrid, and finished up in Berlin at the EABIS conference on Experiential Learning.

The conference was held in Erich Honecker’s old office.  Not quite the modest nerve centre of the German Democratic Republic one might think.  The word palatial springs to mind as we shifted our gaze around the panelled walls and out at the sinister television tower in Alexanderplatz  that that dominates  Berlin from almost every angle.  The last time I was here was before the wall came down.  Something of a bleak memory.

This is the presentation from the conference.  You can see the speaker notes that accompany the slides by clicking on the Slideshare  ‘Speaker Notes’ tab below the presentation after clicking  here.

Sound Strategies is not planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro this year. But it is supporting someone who is. That person is the world famous percussionist, Dame Evelyn Glennie, a musical colleague and one-time collaborator with Sound Strategies consultants Michael Spencer and Andrew Peggie.

There is a good cause, as Glennie explains: ‘I have chosen AbleChildAfrica and the challenge of climbing Kilimanjaro because I want to make a sustainable difference to our next generation. I have good reason to recognize the importance of education for ALL children; it empowered me to make my own unique journey in life. The children supported … by this charity desperately need inclusion. A disabled child in Africa is too often without hope. Enabling these children means enrichment, quality of life, and reduced dependency for them, their families and communities. My challenge is to climb a mountain – your challenge is to help me make a difference’.

As many people will know, Dame Evelyn’s personal experience is of overcoming a hearing disability in spectacular fashion, by becoming a world class solo percussionist. And she is perhaps a unique embodiment of the Sound Strategies professional ethic: hearing is not enough – we need to listen. And listening involves the whole body and mind, a sensitivity to resonances everywhere, both physical and intangible, and the ability interpret and reflect this invisible agitation of molecules in ways which are creative, productive and beneficial.

Just as Sound Strategies takes the principles of musical communication and applies them to a much wider professional and corporate environment, so Dame Evelyn extends the limits of hearing into all forms of communication.

Presumably she will take some drumsticks on her ascent up the mountain. Some of the world’s first percussion instruments were probably created in Africa. Before pre-humans invented resonating materials such as iron and bronze, or stretched animal skins, or tensed bowstrings, it’s most probable that they discovered the resonating qualities of some rocks and stones. The lithophone still exists in parts of Africa. It has stone bars instead of wooden ones such as in a xylophone.

Will she discover any new sounds? Probably not. Will the altitude make a difference to any sounds produced? In theory changes in air pressure and composition affect the transmission of air-based pressure waves (sounds), though these changes would be virtually undetectable by the human ear. As all musicians know, communicable sounds need some means of resonance to aid their propagation. The top of a mountain is like an anechoic chamber – there is nothing for the sound waves to reflect back from, so the effect will be a scary, ‘dead’ silence where sounds simply appear to ‘fall’ to the ground with no carrying power. Assuming of course there is no gale blowing. If there is, the sound will come from the ‘edge tones’ created by the wind around the ears and bodies present which form points of turbulence.

Sound is a form of turbulence, disturbance, of life. Things have to move, oscillate and change to create sounds. Our bodies respond to sounds whether we want to pay attention or not. Conflicting or disturbing sounds affect us both physiologically and psychologically. That is why being able to manage our sonic working environment is so important.

Dame Evelyn will be making her ascent from November 25 to December 3. She is one of the patrons for Able Child Africa and is committed to raising £25k to provide educational facilities for disabled children in Africa. There are in excess of 50 million disabled children who never have access to education and therefore are unable to make the most basic life choices. The organisation seeks to provide inclusion for them and thus help them to help themselves.

We hope her actions will resonate sufficiently to encourage you to donate to the cause: http://www.justgiving.com/Evelyn-Glennie

Gastrosonics?