A Product Sound Sketching Tool for inexperienced product sound designers

In our daily lives we are surrounded by product sounds, whether it is the rattling of an electric toothbrush, or the whooshing sound of a washing machine. Contributing to the total user experience of a product (e.g., product functionality, identity, and satisfaction), it is important for designers to consider product sounds. A framework for product sound design related communication has been put forward by Özcan & van Egmond [2006]. This framework essentially states that product sound design should be incorporated from the very beginning of the product development process. Sounding sketches have been proposed as communication method during the conceptual design phase. However, designers currently lack a tool that facilitates sketching of product sounds. Existing tools are focussed on musical sounds, and designers are often faced with their limited sound vocabulary when using tools that rely on semantics.

Note: objects are tracked by means of the visual tags of the reacTIVision system

Therefore, a concept for a Product Sound Sketching Tool (PSST) was developed as objective for a master’s thesis [Jansen, 2009]. PSST consists of a dedicated product sound synthesizer, a collection of playful objects, and a table with a web-cam to track the objects on. Through their visual and tactile designs, these objects serve as physical representations of the synthesizer’s virtual sound parameters. For example: the speed of periodic volume fluctuations found at, e.g., washing machines is controlled by adjusting the length of a sine-like leather belt wrapped around two cylinders. In this way, product sound design is made tangible.

Here’s an example of me creating the whooshing sound of a washing machine.

Sound examples

An initial experiment was conducted, in which three participants each received three assignments. Each assignment was formulated as: “Design the sound of an energetic (not sluggish) [product],” with [product] being an electric toothbrush, a vacuum cleaner, or a washing machine. The following sounds were created:

 

References

Jansen, R.J. (2009). Development of a Product Sound Sketching Tool for unexperienced industrial product sound designers. Master’s thesis, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.

Özcan, E. & van Egmond, R. (2006). Product sound design and application: An overview. Proceedings of the International Conference on Design and Emotion, Sweden, 5, 1-19.

reacTIVision (2010) “reacTIVision: A Toolkit for Tangible Multi-Touch Surfaces”, Version 1.4, http://reactivision.sourceforge.net, last visited: February 2010.