For the last two years, I’ve opened my ears and heard a hidden world.

I don’t have a super power. I am not hooked up to a bunch of specialized gear (apart from too-expensive headphones and speakers). I’ve been working on a book with a sonic branding expert and composer, Joel Beckerman (the book, The Sonic Boom, How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy came out last week).

I fine-tuned my everyday sense of hearing to listen to how sound is used by brands. Then I started hearing all sorts of ways that sound guides us and reveals information we use constantly — in our devices, shoes, voices, food, packaging and more.

You can hear what I hear, starting right now. Close your eyes for 30 seconds and just listen. Hear all of that talking, beeps, clicks and bangs? That’s the foreground. This is where you’ll find a lot of branded sounds. But keep listening. Hear a plane flying over? A subway rumbling underground? Listen deeper still. Can you hear your own heartbeat? A background ringing in your ears? If I said “wind,” would you suddenly realize you were hearing the air moving?

Sound is the most efficient of our senses when it comes to recognizing and acting upon stimuli. In fact, every creature naturally born with a backbone has some way of sensing sound. It’s a way our ancestors survived — sound helped early man detect the proximity of his next meal in the bushes and helped him avoid the threat of a creature that sought to dine on him. We hear our mother’s voice in the womb and recognize her sound before we recognize her face. Even as adults, sound influences our mood and behavior, even when we don’t actively listen to it. It offers direction. Sound asks very little and delivers incredibly rich sets of information, emotion and context. Sound helps us understand our world.

For us in the fields of communications and marketing, sound is a powerful tool when we learn to use it strategically.

Think about the sound of sizzling fajitas at Chili’s. It turns your head, makes you realize the fried onion smell in the air and causes your mouth to water, even if you didn’t order the dish. Think about the tinkly tune coming from the ice cream truck that causes us as children to freak out, beg mom or dad for change and dart out the door in pursuit, even if we have a freezer full of store-bought, high-quality ice cream. The memory of that sound sticks with us through adulthood. It becomes wired in to our brains and, when played, it can quickly access all of the emotions and actions you’ve associated with that music since you were a kid. (Mister Softee suddenly sounds pretty good right now, doesn’t it?)

“The moment you become engaged with a memory from your more distant past, you bring these areas [of your brain] online,” says Petr Janata, a UC Davis neuroscientist I interviewed for the book. “When you have that ice cream tune stuck in your head… just the suggestion can trigger that internal imagery process to happen.”

Consider the way this works in retail stores, where music speeds us up and slows us down as we shop. It guides our journey, changes our perception of wait time and helps us feel good, and we never have to realize it. In luxury automobiles, sounds in the background of the experience send subtle cues to help us feel like we’re getting our money’s worth: the dull, air-tight thunk of the driver’s door of a Volkswagen*; the distinct baritone growl of a European engine. It’s how you tell a Mustang from an M-Class, even if you’re not a gear head.

In researching the book, Joel and I learned that seven out of 10 of the top global brands have a sonic strategy to provide great experiences to customers and employees, because they know, in a world cluttered with visual marketing, there’s a coming battle for your ears. Sound is an early measure of trust, too, the first sign that a story is true or a lie.

We’re surrounded by way more sound than we could ever pay attention to. Too often, as communications professionals, we misuse sound, bolt it on at the end of the creative process or forget about it until it rubs us the wrong way. And too many sounds offer no real information or purpose. When sound doesn’t help us understand something, we call it noise.

There’s no better way to realize this power of sound than to hear it done wrong. Some marketers fail spectacularly because they are oblivious to the sounds of their own products, like the sonic trash created by the biodegradable version of the Sun Chips snack bag, which inspired 40,000 people to like the Facebook page, “Sorry I Can’t Hear You Over this Sun Chips Bag.” It’s the Creedence Clearwater Revival protest song “Fortunate Son” played to promote Wrangler jeans. It’s every car alarm ever.

After my own experiment in listening a bit closer to the world, I’m suggesting that we all consider sound more intentionally. And the goal isn’t just avoid creating more sonic trash. Whether it’s a global campaign or a project with a tight budget and high expectations, the solution might be right between your ears.

*Edelman client

Tyler Gray is Edelman New York’s editorial director and co-author of The Sonic Boom, How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy.

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