A quieter place: Sound designer Eddie Gandelman on composing a future that allows us to hear ourselves think

As our everyday, man-made products compete to be the most earsplitting, this sonic experience designer is trading in the “needle pricks” for spatial reverb, wood tapping, and bird song.

In even a 30-minute trip to the grocery store, you’re likely to encounter dozens of human-made sounds: barcode scanners beeping, self-checkout robovoices droning, intercoms crackling to life. We accept this noise as an inherent part of the experience, but it’s hurting us.

Barcode scanners like this one have medium and high pitch settings at 3,250 and 4,200 hertz, respectively. Higher-frequency sounds, often classified as those starting at 2,000 hertz, can activate the sympathetic nervous system. Our fight or flight response kicks in, and our body braces for danger: Our heart rate increases, blood vessels constrict, and stress hormones like cortisol flood the bloodstream. 

All to price-check a stalk of broccoli. 

“It’s almost unethical to produce these alarming, terrible, basically hurtful sounds,” says Eddie Gandelman, sound experience designer at Priority Designs, an employee-owned product development company in Columbus, Ohio. “And, if you then think about the whole sonic environment, there’s not just one device — there are hundreds of these devices.”

That’s not taking into account the real life-or-death consequences of poor sound design: In hospitals, medical staff can hear up to 1,000 alarms in a single shift. The resulting “alarm fatigue” — a phenomenon in which professionals begin to tune out this deluge of beeps — contributed to more than 500 deaths over a five-year period.  

Sound is all too often a second — or fifth or final — thought when it comes to product development. The time-to-market period stretches on each time a product is tweaked or tested, jeopardizing sales and success. So we’re left with noise that registers “like a needle prick in your body,” says Gandelman. Also a musician, he believes a better world is a better sounding one. 

“If people really considered the design of full sonic experiences and soundscapes, you would get less dissonance in your life, where notes are colliding, sounds are colliding, things are grabbing your attention all the time,” he explains. “Then you could get more positive, joyful, musical experiences where things feel more harmonious.”

From his sound studio, he chats with Design Observer about the possibilities of not only a better consumer experience, but a better human one that allows us to hear our own thoughts above the fray. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Rachel Paese: Are there any sounds in the built or natural environment that people might be surprised to learn are designed?

Eddie Gandelman: Most of it, I would say, is engineered. It’s still at that point. So many sounds that people have added to environments have been so thoughtlessly and quickly done. And it’s really the core of the problem, which is that we’ve oversaturated sonic environments with terrible sounds. Things have just been at the mercy of technology or budget needs.

RP: What’s the difference between a sound that has been thoughtlessly engineered and one that’s been designed?

EG: I love that question. Something that’s more thoughtless is done quickly, and companies don’t invest or think about the user experience or the actual design process, which requires research and interviews and testing and prototyping and refinement to make sure that the sounds are actually being understood by people. They need to have the appropriate urgency levels and appropriate meaning and messaging of the tones.

Once you get into user testing, it’s amazing how people misunderstand simple design elements like sounds. Oftentimes, what we think is a negative sound ends up being a sound that people like. Some of the levers we have to pull are: more positive, more negative, more urgent, less urgent. When you don’t do that, you just get sonic experiences that are over-communicating and under-communicating at times.

RP: What are some of the ways that product sounds — especially those added as an afterthought — affect us?

EG: When we’re designing sounds, we’re accessing a channel that is direct to the human brain and to people’s experience. There’s a story here of mental health and physical health concerns. We’re over-saturating people — maybe not physically hurting them, but audibly hurting them with these kinds of sounds.

One example is just a simple electronic beep, like when you plug in a device: 

4,000 hertz, which is what that beep is, is right in the middle of our most harsh sensitivity zone for hearing. Between 2,000 and 5,000 hertz are really high pitch notes — kind of like nails on a chalkboard or when you hear high piano notes. It alarms you a little bit. We’re very sensitive in those zones, and this manufacturer put this 4,000 hertz loud, screeching beep just when you plug in the device. It was an unimportant sound. It did not need to be alarming at all, but they played perhaps the most alarming thing you could play to a user.

So, a lot of what we do is calm things down. We can make things a lot more gentle and stay away from these areas where people are going to react with strong, negative, and alarming senses:

RP: What’s distinct about a sound that we find pleasant or good?

EG: Usually what that means is it’s layered — there’s some nuance to it.

And another trick people do is add reverb and delay, which just gives a sound a little space. It makes it have a natural endpoint. A lot of these harsh digital sounds have a beat that just stops really suddenly. Almost immediately, people can register that as fake and not part of a natural experience. By putting slight, gentle softness on the beginning of the sound, and ending it with spatial reverb or delay, almost instantly that sound will be palatable.

Here is a “power on” sound we did that includes several harmonious layers of sound:

There is a foreground melody, and additional background ambient textures and layers to reinforce the melody for an immersive, full and organic sound. The tone also features extra-long reverb and delays at the end to add spatial presence, which helps welcome users to the experience.

RP: What does it mean for a company to invest in sound design?

EG: Sonic branding is a huge area that basically asks, “What would your company sound like?” If this power-on tone is emblematic or representative of your brand, how do you incorporate your brand attributes into sound?

It’s a caring stance to say, “We want this product not to selfishly occupy your whole life, but be a seamless part of it. And we’re going to be quiet, not loud.” Every manufacturer wants to be loud and grab all the attention they can. When everyone just goes loud, we end up with real problems.

RP: Like what?

EG: For example, in hospital environments where so many devices are sounding loud alarms all the time, alarm fatigue is a real problem. Basically, it’s like the boy who cried wolf: Nurses and technicians stop paying attention to alarms. 

One of the reasons it happens is because manufacturers, especially in the health care space, have liability concerns, so they go to the maximum allowed loudness to make things as attention-grabbing as possible. It’s been worked on for many years, and it’s much more complex than just a sound designer fixing bad alarms. It’s a lot about systems and devices talking to each other.

For example, this was a project we did for robotic surgery:

We had full control over all the sounds we were making, and with robotic systems, there’s between 20 and 30 sounds that we have to create. They all have to be cohesive and work well with that urgency spectrum so we’re not over-alerting or oversaturating the sounds with something that gets ignored after a while.

RP: What are some of the biggest areas of focus for sound designers who want consumers to have a better experience, but more broadly, want to design a better world?

EG: My opinion is that a better-sounding world is a quieter and more natural-sounding world. Nature sounds great. If you go to the park or if you go on a hike in the woods, an undervalued part of that experience is how nice it sounds.

You don’t hear man-made, aggressive, inappropriate sounds. Everything you hear is balancing beauty and function. A bird sound is a great example of something that’s super functional. They make very loud, intense, and clearly communicating sounds for their purposes, but they’re also just so beautiful. Without getting too poetic, there’s something just maybe perfect about the sounds of nature. So, I see a lot of sound design going in that direction — making sounds that really understand and appreciate the natural world.

But there’s kind of an interesting balance there with technology. We want things to sound cutting-edge and high-tech and sleek, too, so a lot of sound designers take some of those natural things and sort of remix them.

For example, I did a tap sound for a device. What we did was capture the sound of people tapping on various materials. I was tapping on glass and plastic and wood, and captured all these different physical taps and presented the client like 20 concepts. Some of them had a little bit more of that natural tap, and some of them digitized it a little more and manipulated it to be something a little more techy. So I think there’s a balance of playing with a natural world and pushing it to something that’s new and exciting. 

RP: Where is sound design going next? Is there any hope for a better-sounding future?

EG: This is a growing industry. It’s been growing for a long time, but I still see more and more people paying attention. Executive stakeholders are starting to say, “We need our sounds to be better.” So when it comes from the top, of course, more change can happen, especially in these corporate places. Products are getting more and more complex and smart and nuanced. It’s important that people start paying more attention.