What Is a Sound DNA?

I talked with Alex Woodrich from Why Do Birds, an audio branding agency based in Berlin Germany. Alex founded it about 10 years ago with the intent of contracting more sonic branding work. The name Why Do Birds came from the metaphor of a bird. Birds have a beautiful corporate design. They are easy to distinguish as each bird has its own song.

Why don’t we do it like birds? They are both visually stimulating and pleasing to listen to; just as we’d want our brand to be thought of I would imagine? The company’s naming was also inspired by Burt Bacharach’s song Close To You.

Why Do Birds

Brands, as well as people, do not just communicate visually. There are 5 senses. We should be striving to use as many of our senses as we can to define our brand.

The company digs deep. They research the potential brand extensively before deciding if they’re a good fit because once they’re on board, Why Do Birds puts a lot of time and energy into creating a secure foundation of a sound DNA. This shows clearly in their work (See examples further down in this blog).

First, they brainstorm with the brand to figure out the tonality of the piece in general. This is decided through workshops. The findings from those workshops are brought back to the studio and ultimately created and fined tuned. The final product takes months and months of extensive work and research.

It’s important to note that a sound identity is not an overnight process. It is the marrying of a brand with its accurate brand sound. It is a process that can’t be rushed into a result.

The Siemens Campaign

Why Do Birds did a very extensive project with Siemens several years back. Siemens is a very technically driven company with a massive amount of engineers in their employ. In the past, they’d used very technical sounds which didn’t translate to “personal” or “relatable”. However, these engineers were becoming more and more involved in helping solve real world problems. Siemens knew they needed to be more relevant to this broader audience.

It was Why Do Birds’ job to let people know that Siemens wanted to be more accessible to society. So they tried using a human female voice for their logo. Siemens employees were about 80% male so the company was initially worried about the employee response to a female direction. Their fears were laid to rest as they found that everyone liked it very much.

Why Do Birds also helped Siemens show that they were now a digital company by morphing from analogue to digital sounds within their logo.

The result: Siemens is using it throughout their entire brand now. They went full in. It became the DNA of their sound. The logo became the foundation of the sound they incorporated throughout their entire company.

The Hyundai Pavilion Project

Why Do Birds was called in to work with Hyundai on the Hyundai Pavilion Project.

Hyundai was showcasing their fuel cell technology at the South Korea Winter Olympics in 2018. They had to find a way to express that technology and its power and efficiency through an immersive experience by means of sound.

Why Do Birds had worked with Hyundai for a year or two before the Pavilion project so they had lots of material to pick from. They had already developed the corporate sound. There was already so much music written for the brand that they had 8 hours of sound design running through their car showrooms. Needless to say, there was a lot of material to draw from for the Pavilion project.

To best understand what the Hyundai Pavilion is, I suggest reading Why Do Birds’ summation here but basically, it was a building built as an artistic experience to showcase the power and wonder of fuel cell technology. People would walk through the building for some 20 minutes to experience what Hyundai was showcasing. Why Do Birds was tasked to “translate” what the viewer should be experiencing through sound.

The company took it to an amazing extreme. They extracted grains of sound out of audio bits to symbolize the separation of molecules. They created an acoustic illusion of an ever-rising sound to symbolize the cyclical charging of a battery. They incorporated the perception of wind through a piano voicing. They used underwater microphones to incorporate the purity of water sounds.

At the end of the day, the experience was a holistic and immersive experience that was pleasant rather than just “technically correct”. Why Do Birds was told by Hyundai that the sound gave the room “dignity” which is high praise in Asian culture.

Benefits of a Long Term Relationship

Branding projects in general are long term. There is a lot of time and resources invested. You must also keep it up-to-date and interesting. Your brand needs to stay relevant.

Branding should not be looked at as a project but a process. If you think you can just stop working on it, then you’ve lost.

The possibilities of sound are changing everyday and more and more opportunities are popping up everywhere. A company needs someone who has their ear to the ground at all times on all the groundbreaking new tech. And so a long term relationship with a sonic branding agency is the best solution.

Global Vs. Regional Sound Temperature

50% of Why Do Birds’ clients are German, however, they’ve been approached by companies and brands all over the world (India, Abu Dhabi, Russia, China, South Korea, etc.).

Brands are realizing more and more that sound in their marketing does in fact matter. And they don’t want to depend wholly on the voice of Alexa and Siri anymore. Their brand needs a voice of its own and they’re starting to figure this out.

How Can Companies Explore a Sound Strategy?

Consistent messaging is key and, as Alex mentioned, it’s that much more important for a small brand to explore sound in marketing. They have a power with voice that could potentially set them ahead of their major competitors if they model their future towards voice and their competitor doesn’t. Or even if their voicing is more effective.

Wherever you have sound or communicate, you need to communicate uniformly.

Alex ended with a great point. “You don’t change the color of your hair everyday or change the style of your clothes. People recognize you for your style and they’d be surprised if you were to change that all of a sudden.”

In Conclusion

Here’s something to think about. Notification sounds date back to the beginning with bird calls. Birds use notification sounds for everything from contact calls to warning calls that predators are near by. Why wouldn’t we use what the birds figured out long ago to communicate our messaging?

For more information on me and what I do, you can find me at Dreamrproductions.com, Linkedin, and Facebook. You can also check out my podcast Sound In Marketing where I talk about…all the things.

I’d love to help you on your sonic branding journey in any way I can so leave a comment, write a review, send me an email and let’s chat more!

Remember, we all make sounds. Let’s make them on purpose. Let’s make this world of Sound more intriguing, more unique, and more and more on brand.