Designing with Sound

Sound can profoundly impact how people interact with your product. Well-designed sounds can be exceptionally effective in conveying subtle distinctions, emotion, urgency, and information without adding visual clutter. In this practical guide, Amber Case and Aaron Day explain why sound design is critical to the success of products, environments, and experiences.

Just as visual designers have a set of benchmarks and a design language to guide their work, this book provides a toolkit for the auditory experience, improving collaboration for a wide variety of stakeholders, from product developers to composers, user experience designers to architects. You’ll learn a complete process for designing, prototyping, and testing sound.

In two parts, this guide includes:

• Past, present, and upcoming advances in sound design
• Principles for designing quieter products
• Guidelines for intelligently adding and removing sound in interactions
• When to use voice interfaces, how to consider personalities, and how to build a knowledge map of queries
• Working with brands to create unique and effective audio logos that will speak to your customers
• Adding information using sonification and generative audio

Amber Case studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds. Case has spoken, performed and written about the future of sound design at conferences and events around the world. Case is also the author of Calm Technology (O'Reilly, 2015). She lives in Portland, Oregon and online @caseorganic.

Aaron Day has been designing sound experiences and interfaces since 1998. He has worked for clients including Bruel & Kjaer, Fiat, Ferrari, Maserati, Wire, Mozilla, Qoros, Telefònica, Bosch, Vodafone, Sprint, Siemens Audi and Samsung. Aaron lives with his family in Berlin, Germany.