Designing Sound

Hello.

Welcome, everyone.

Imagine, the next version of your app will have no graphical UI at all.

How would you interact with it? What could that sound like? I'm Hugo Verweij, sound designer in the Human Interface team. I had the pleasure on working of many of the sounds you hear through your Apple devices, and I love thinking about these kind of questions.

There are probably some musicians in the room, maybe even one or two sound designers, but that is by no means required for this talk.

This session is for everyone, even if you've never recorded a single sound in your life.

I'm also not going to teach you how to become a sound designer, but I hope I'm going to give you some ideas of how to incorporate sound in your design process and why it makes sense to do so. Now, as a developer, you have a lot on your plate and adding sound to your app is probably not super high on your to-do list, but I like to make the case that sound, if used the right way, really can help transform the experience of your product. Now at Apple and at WWDC, we talk a lot about visual design.

For now though, let's just try to use our ears for a little while. I'd like to ask you all to just close your eyes for one minute, and imagine you're in a forest.

This might help you.

It's a quiet afternoon, and you're going for a walk. The weather seems very nice. But then [phone notification sound] Dark Sky is predicting rain.

You better pick up the pace.

Okay, you can open your eyes now.

Oh, we're not in a forest. We're actually at WWDC. Sound has this magical ability to calm us down, to get on our nerves, to scare us, or to delight us. When we close our eyes, it has the power to transport us to places.

I want to talk about the following things today.

Why sound is an important aspect of design, designing sounds for notifications, designing sounds for UI elements, and some tips and techniques to get you started. Sound is everywhere, all around us, and we never really pay much attention to it. Church bells have been telling the time for many centuries in countries all across the world, like here in my beautiful home town, Amsterdam. They tell us the time. They tell us where we are. They give us a sense of context.

We also use our ears for an early warning system, like when we're about to cross the street and we hear this -- [brakes screeching] -- we don't need our eyes to understand it's not safe to cross. Or we listen for quick confirmations every day. When you put on your seatbelt , you don't have to double check it's fastened. You hear the click, and you know you're good to go. We can also listen for more nuanced things, like the sound of someone's footsteps may tell us something about their emotional state .

Are they calm? Are they in a hurry? And if we know a person very well, we may even recognize them by the sound of their footsteps. . So what we hear has a big impact on how we feel and what we do, and sound helps us make sense of the things going on around us.

Now we know that sound is such a powerful medium. How can we use it in our design? Many people think that design is about what a product looks like or at Apple we pay a lot of attention to, how it works.

We think design is also about what it feels like and what it sounds like.

So what is the role of sound in design? It's like using a universal language that is already understood by everyone. It helps shape the experience of a product. It helps us understand interactions better. And it gives our devices a voice so they can tell us things, they can talk back to us.

So if your iPhone is playing a sound, what is it trying to tell you? . You just used Apple Pay successfully. . Or maybe it didn't go so well. Try again, please.

. Somebody just texted you.

Or good morning. It's time to wake up.

Or at the end of the day it's almost time to go to bed.

Many times though, when an app plays a sound, we don't really know what it means. It sounds like this. . We have to look at our screen to understand what's going on. It's like a way for our phone to say, "Hey, look at me. Something happened, but I don't really know what." It's not a very intelligent way of communicating. So how can we improve on this? Well, if your app relies on notifications, it makes a lot of sense to think about creating your own notification sound. What do you want people to experience when they receive that notification? Do you want people to recognize that it's coming from your app? If you don't do this, you are stuck with the default we just heard, and it doesn't really say much about where it's coming from and what it means, so it's a missed opportunity to distinguish your app, your app's unique identity. Now, before, when we were in the forest, we heard the Dark Sky notification, and Dark Sky is a weather app, and it sends this notification when rain is imminent.

It does this pretty well. Let's listen to it again. And why does this work so well? . This sound is easily recognizable. When you hear this, you know it's coming from Dark Sky.

It conveys a message. It's not a direct recording of raindrops, but it has this liquid quality to it. It helps you connect the sound to the message it's sending. It's a friendly sound. It's not jarring, but telling you in a friendly way it's time to find cover soon.

And it's a simple and clean sound, quite pleasant to listen to as well. So let's try this ourselves. Let's create a sound for an app. Shall we? Well, first we need an app, of course. Well, luckily, some years ago, our prototyping team did a session. It was called "Fake It Till You Make It." It was about creating fake apps in order to learn from how people would interact with them.

They create an app called Toast Modern.

Now, maybe some of you know that toast has become very popular in San Francisco, and people pay a lot of money for a slice of what some call hipster toast.

Toast Modern, the app they created, helps you find overpriced artisanal toast on the streets of San Francisco and share this with your friends and family. Now if someone sends you some newly discovered toast, you get a notification. So we can create a sound for this notification. Let's do that.

We can start by asking ourselves some questions, like, "What is the essence of what this app is about?" Well, in this case, simple. It's about finding toast and sharing it with your friends. What emotion do we want to evoke here when people receive this notification? Well, we want them to be happy they found some new toast to try and eager to try it out.

How do we match the app's aesthetics? We just saw the screen, and it looks pretty functional and simple, so let's keep the sound similar to that, keep it simple and to the point. And if we notice, we can start with some sound sources. We can record some sounds to be inspired by. In this case, let's just get some bread. Let's get a toaster and record those sounds.

So that's exactly what we did, and here are some of the sounds we recorded.

Toaster ejecting toast.

Spreading butter on a piece of toast. The sound of toast breaking.

And taking a bite out of a piece of toast. Now we can also create a little bit of a story from the beginning to the end, you know, making toast and eating toast, and record the whole process. . .