Heard mentality: A brief history of the audio cues that direct your day

The shrill car-in-reverse tone compels one to look around to confirm one is not in the vehicle’s path. We also respond intuitively to the beeps just before a traffic signal changes; to the shutter sound of a smartphone camera; the whirring of a helicopter (studies have found that humans literally cannot not look up).

Perhaps the most hotly debated of these — the back-up beeper for cars — was created in 1963 by Matsusaburo Yamaguchi of the Yamaguchi Electric Company in Japan. It’s one of the most-hated audio inventions, but it has also proved to be life-saving.

“Our brains format the signals that comprise the physical world so they have meaning to us. Making sense of sound is profoundly governed by how we feel, think, see and move. Conversely, hearing influences how we feel, think, see and move,” writes Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist and professor at Northwestern University, in her book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World (MIT Press; 2022).

Studies have found that sounds from our childhood and youth influence our emotions disproportionately. Auditory-induced nostalgia (aromas, of course, are another powerful trigger) explains why the songs of one’s teen years hold greater sway than anything produced in one’s present times. For our parents, the same tunes remain meaningless. They’ll argue that there’s nothing better than songs of their teen years.

Finely tuned

The use of sound to influence mass action can be traced to 400 CE. A few decades after emperor Constantine embraced Christianity, church bells were introduced across the Roman empire, as a call to worship. The practice eventually became widespread across Europe and went on to be used to tell the time.

In the centuries since, sounds have been used to boost sales, raise brand recognition, evoke a certain emotion. The power of sound to sell was first recognised in 18th-century England, where the ad jingle was born. Local traders paid musicians to write and perform songs about them and their wares. The nursery rhyme Hot Cross Buns is believed to have started out as one such ditty.

The next big breakthrough would come in the mid-19th century, with the invention of sound-recording technology. By the 1920s, the radio had spawned the broadcast jingle, with the first such ad being the Wheaties commercial sung by the “Wheaties Quartet”, telling people in the twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul that it was “the best breakfast food in the land” (sales zoomed as a result of the sense of novelty and the brand recognition this spawned).

By 1928, the film studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) had recorded its first roar (it’s been re-recorded several times since, as technology evolved). It still plays before every MGM movie and remains one of the world’s most widely recognised sonic logos.

Because sound-recording was such a complicated and expensive exercise, certain clips from the early years became stock sounds, and were used and reused to evoke certain emotions. These include the Wilhelm Scream (a short, desperate shriek), first used in the 1951 film Distant Drums and since featured in hundreds of movies, including Star Wars: Episode IV, when Luke Skywalker shoots a Stormtrooper off his ledge.

You might also recognise The Murder, a clip of screeching violins, violas and cellos composed by Bernard Herrmann and best known as the background score of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). These clips continue to be used, sometimes in satire or homage, but always to evoke the emotions to which they were first attached.

Byte-sized

By the dawn of the tech age in the 1990s, the importance of audio mnemonics was well-established. So, when tech companies put the finishing touches on their user interfaces, they had a firm ear on the sound.

This is when some of the most iconic sonic logos were created. Take the Intel bong. It is said that, on average, it is played somewhere in the world every five minutes. This seemingly simple five-note tune played at the end of every ad that uses an Intel processor was composed by Austrian musician Walter Werzowa and is actually made up of 20 different audio layers and uses a combination of synthesisers, xylophones and marimba.

Over at Microsoft, British musician Brian Eno composed the trilling six-second Windows 95 startup melody, on a Mac. The Apple / Macintosh startup sound, called Sosumi (a play on ‘so sue me’, after a lawsuit between The Beatles’ Apple Corps recording company and Apple Computers, over the word Apple), was created by then-Apple designer Jim Reekes.

And while the series of mechanical whirrs, beeps and screeches from the early years of dial-up internet connections are all-but-gone, some anachronistic audio cues linger on, even when they’re no longer strictly needed. Smartphone users around the world, for instance, have Reekes to thank for preserving the one of a camera shutter closing and opening. Reekes recorded the sound from his 1970s Canon AE-1 SLR, and it’s still what one hears when the iPhone camera clicks.

As electric vehicles go silent, EV manufacturers are working with musicians and composers to craft pedestrian warning systems to take the place of the warning sound of the combustion engine. “The advent of the electric car is a great opportunity to create sound effects. I want a silent electric car with the sounds from the Star Trek: The Next Generation library. People should be able to buy themes for their silent cars. I could imagine the Flintstone sounds, the one you heard as the cartoons accelerate the vehicle by running their feet under the floorboard,” Reekes said, in an interview with the Medium publication OneZero in 2019.

For sounds not needed but essential nonetheless, look no further than the computer mouse. There is technically no need for it to click, and yet there aren’t many takers for a silent mouse. Users find the dissonance simply impossible to work with.