Targeting emotions with sound

Brian Carruthers

Looks at the concept of “sonic seasonings” and how, by altering various aspects of music, it’s possible to target emotions with sound.

It sounds like a candidate for an Ig Nobel Prize: Steve Keller played hip hop to cheese as it aged for six months. His aim was to see if he could change its molecular structure.

“You actually can,” claimed the sonic strategy director of SXM Media’s in-house creative agency, “because it’s affecting the micro organisms as they’re developing – and that changes the aroma and the flavour of the cheese.”

This was an exercise in psycho-acoustics, but Keller’s work ranges across a whole range of sound-related activity, from psycho-physics (how we use our sensory input to make sense...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands