The Super Bowl isn't just a game, it's a cinematic experience. Minutes before kickoff, trumpets blare, as though armies were charging towards each other for a clash. During the game, sounds herald the appearance of onscreen statistics and instant replays. Depending on your reason for watching the game, the signature tune that segues to a commercial break might trigger you to rush to the bathroom, or shush everyone else so you can hear the ads.
Read an excerpt from the book about the evolution of Apple's iconic Mac startup sound.This soundscape has been carefully orchestrated by people like Joel Beckerman. In 2012, he arranged the score for Super Bowl XLVI, which became the most watched television event in history. (It's since been eclipsed by 2014's matchup.) He's a master of using sound and music to trigger chains of sensory and emotional responses that he calls "boom moments." His company, Man Made Music, is responsible for everything from the sweeping sonic experience of the Super Bowl to the ubiquitous four-tone chime of AT&T.
In his new book, The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy, Beckerman wants to sell you on the power of sound. The book is geared towards the would-be "sonic brander," the sort of person who dreams of coming up with the next million-dollar jingle, and leans heavily on experience and anecdote. But, he backs up his own experience with science, where it exists. He talked to WIRED about some of the ways that sound shapes our behavior.
Sound is faster than light
You’re curled up tight on the couch, watching the figure on the screen walk down a dark, dripping tunnel. Suddenly, something flickers in the corner of the screen, punctuated by a brief flutter of discordant stringed instruments. You twitch, but before you register it, the hero’s eye, then the camera, pans to track the movement.
Suddenly the hero is knocked off screen by a huge dark shape, accompanied by a rapid crescendo of screeching violins and clattering cymbals. Uncontrollably, your entire body contracts and you let out a small whimper. Your heart is racing.
If you were to play back the scary part of the movie over, you'd see that the video isn't perfectly synched up with the images on screen. The punch of sound that tells your brain to jump actually comes a second or two after the alien jumps out of the shadows.
Beckerman has scored several science fiction and horror movies, and he says he learned early on that synching up the scary noises perfectly to the scenes on the screen ruins the surprise. In experiments dating back to late 1800s, sound has consistently outpaced sight in reaction response. It varies from person to person, but we typically react about 40 milliseconds faster to sound than we do light.
There may be a good evolutionary reason for this, says Beckerman. "When you think about it from a survival point of view, there is a tremendous evolutionary advantage to a primate that can react instantly to something that is out of their line of sight," Beckerman said.
Sound triggers other senses
Beckerman opens his book with a restaurant scene: You are sitting in a Chili’s. Halfway your first margarita, a loud sizzle grabs your attention. It's not quite startling, but it momentarily commands your attention. Your eyes dart from one red-shirted server to another, looking for steam. Then you see it, and finally you get the smell of sizzling steak as a server walks by with a plate of fajitas. “You get a multi-sensory chain reaction, triggered first by the sound,” says Beckerman. By the time the smell hits, you're already annoyed at yourself for ordering the burger.
This is classical conditioning. Like Pavlov and his drooling dogs, Chili's and other chain restaurants have trained us to pay attention to the sizzle. Your eyes immediately seek out the source of the sound, and by the time you spot the steaming skillet, you've probably smelled it and your brain is trying to figure out how to get it.
The ingredients, as Pavlov knew, and Beckerman explains, are to have an attention-grabbing sound followed up by multisensory cues, culminating in a reward: the savory smell of sizzling meat.
How Apple manipulates you with sound
Back in the day, you’d push the power button on your Macintosh Quadra 700, and it took a minute or two to boot up. Then again, it might just crash instead. But you were patient. You and Apple stuck it out, and Beckerman argues one of the reasons is the computer's signature startup sound (read a more detailed excerpt from Sonic Boom here). It's a C major, a chord that for reasons scientists don't fully understand, tends to trigger positive feelings. Rather than training our brains to create positive associations from scratch, Apple used a sound with existing associations to ease the pains of early personal computing. “Those few seconds triggered a little bit of satisfaction every time," Beckerman said.
It wasn't always so.
Apple's original startup sound was a tritone, a chord structure that's famous among musicians for its dissonance (it's also called "The Devil's Interval"). In the early 90's, Jim Reekes was working as an engineer for Apple. He hated the tritone, and thought it was hurting the computer's potential to hook users. One night, with a sympathetic manager's help, snuck in the code for that beautiful, richly layered C major that every Mac user since. Reekes' coup branded the early Mac experience as something that would be positive, at a time when most programmers thought of sound as nothing more than an alert system. (This video explains the surprisingly fascinating origins of the Macintosh startup sound. Warning: Reekes has a potty mouth.)
Users noticed. The Byte magazine review for the Quadra 700, the first Mac to use Reekes' startup sound, said, "I knew I was in for something great when I heard it turn on."
Music and sound are not the same
According to Beckerman, sounds like the sizzle of a fajita or a Mac starting up trigger instant reactions. Music, on the other hand, triggers experiences.
To understand the effects of music on the brain, Beckerman consulted heavily with Petr Janata, a psychologist at UC Davis. Janata and his research group have been studying how music triggers emotion-laden memories. Janata explains that simple sounds create quick, powerful responses in people's brains. However, fMRI scans suggest that music activates many more areas, and in many different ways. To try to figure out what that means, Janata is combining the brain scans with extensive questionnaires that ask subjects about the memories and emotions those songs bring up. His research indicates that familiar music may fire up neurons that recall old mental images and emotions.
Think back to the Super Bowl. Beckerman based his soundtrack on John Williams' song "Wide Receiver", the classic opener from NBC's Sunday Night Football. He rearranged the composition with electric guitars and pounding drums to give it that action movie feel, but the tune still evoked the feeling of football games past. Specially crafted excerpts from the complete piece were reworked to frame moments like touchdowns, or close ups of pensive coaches. Each was familiar, but different enough to not be stale. The final effect, when combined with the ongoing saga between, say, Eli Manning and Tom Brady is like a showdown between American titans. "You really can shift the emotional connection you are making with people moment to moment in music," Beckerman said.
