Sound Designers for Multisensory Product Design & Development

Lorelei is a sonic interaction design studio

We design sounds for your interaction with the world.
Sound enters the heart, sticks in the mind, informs, creates emotions and affection.
We know why and how.

A sonic journey in Southeast Asia

Lorelei recently came back from a work tour in Southeast Asia.

Beside meetings, we took our time for – of course – recording some amazing sounds in the Malaysia forest: insects, waves, frogs and cuisine. In particular, we followed the process of a wok cooking session with the cooperation of the young chef Haru from Island One Café, Pulau Pangkor, Malaysia.

So, put on your headphones (they are all 3D binaural sounds here!) and listen to some mad insects after the daily rain, and to the wok cooking session.

Soundwalking – an emotional way of exploring our world

What is a soundwalk? Actually we soundwalk every very second of our life. That is to say: we alway hear something. We hear when we see, we hear when we touch, we hear when we feel…and even when we sleep, our brain can detect and decodify sounds.

Therefore, a soundwalk is a practice that help us to become aware of the simple concept of hearing sounds, and transform it into a concious attitude of listening to our everyday world.

In 2011 Lorelei guided some soundwalk, helping participants to delope the “listening attitude” through guiding the perception, and stimulating people to focus their hearing od particular sounds. Our source of inspiration is the beautiful article by a “guru” of the sounscape field and the soundwalking practice, Hildegard Westerkamp.

The first soundwalk has been conducted with the students of the Istituto Nicolodi of Florence, one of the most ancient institutions of Italy run by the Italian Union of Blind People.

Guiding a soundwalk with students has been stimulating and inspiring, and a real challenge. The girls and boys of the group gave me back probably more than what I gave them. More than ever they made me realize how we live in a vision-centred society, and how instead our other – often neglected – sense could give us a lot more in term of emotion and information.

The second one has been organized in the frame of the Florentine Tempo Reale Festival, and was dedicated to kids.

The message was: children can hear everything, and they really do care of sound. It’s in the process of growing in a sound-polluted and vision-centred society that we lose this attitude. Stimulating the awareness of this process, I hope to have contributed a little bit to form more informed and emotioned adults in relation to sound.

The soundwalk ended with a challenge: to draw a “sound map” of the process. Kids much interestingly followed three paths: the use of drawing figures, the use of colors, and the use of onomatopoeia. Something to reflect upon in the discussion of what we call the Sonic sketching process.

Photo by Mario Carovani, Tempo Reale

Lorelei for Tokyo Designers Week – Fujitsu Vision Design 2025

In a few days the 2011 edition of Tokyo Designers Week will start. A very important one, with plenty of different feelings – sadness, hope – merging together. The TDW aims this year at launching proposals for the future, under the common theme of ARIGATO – LOVE.

In collaboration with our friends of Metadesign we will be there, for the Fujitsu Vision Design 2025 campaign.

Lorelei designed the space sonification, the official video soundtrack and animation, and – what we are more proud of – collaborated in curating one of the Fujitsu workshops especially dedicated to children.

The sound workshop will bring children (and adults, why not) into a sonic journey that will start with the listening of binaural sounds from Lorelei, played via headphones. It will be – somehow – a virtual soundwalk similar to what we curated last week for Tempo Reale Festival in Florence.

The Italian children that partecipated to the soundwalk have sent a video message for their Japanes mates.

And we too, are sending our message hope to Japan, and to the children that will be adults in 2025. Good luck!

Lorelei team that worked for TDW is: Sara Lenzi, Marco Galardi, Tommaso Cattabrini.

Follow the TDW Fujitsu Vision Design 2025 on Facebook!

Foodfrequency – connect your perception

The new amazing multisensory experience we have been working on for the last months is out!

Foodfrequency is a synesthetic and cross-modal experience based on sound and food. Participants experience a deep immersion in the tastes of Italian cuisine while listening to binaural immersive sounds of the origin of the ingredients (via headphones) alternating a multichannel soundscape without headphones.
The sound content creates a connection with the tastes and flavors, telling the stories of the ingredient and using specific frequencies able to enhance the food experience.
This project is an idea of the amazing chef Giulia Massimiliani and the performer, sound designer and composer Marco Galardi. It’s partly based on published research by Prof. Spence from the Oxford Cross Modal Research Lab and his team, a research well known to Sara Lenzi from Lorelei who contributed to the development of the idea. And of course, we are all personally in love with sound and food.
Michael Byrne is the supercool DJ who created the multichannel soundscape and performes it during the Foodfrequency experience.
Lorelei crew worked on the binaural sounds that participants enjoy during the experience. We recorded all the binaurals travelling to the very place of the ingredients’ origin in Tuscany, Italy with the whole group.
The outstanding chef of the Foodfrequency experience is Giulia Massimiliani, and our favourite oste (and sommelier) is Giulio Bettarini, who guides the experience leading the participants through sounds&food.

Some interesting hints of the Foodfrequency experience are…

100% of the participants rated as excellent the food experience
75% rated the experience as intimate and immersive as they expected
87% rated as very important the influence of sound on the food experience

100% would have repetead the experience immediatly, and would suggest it to a friend

So…if you want to know more, book an experience or ask any question, write us at info@foodfrequency.it – the official website will be on line soon!

If touching wood is first of all a (sonic) experience, then a brand

Here at Lorelei we’ve been talking a lot about synesthetic association and cross-modal perception, recently. So when I bumped into the new campaign for DOCOMO, the Japanese leading provide of mobile services, and created by Dril Inc. well…i loved it!

We have 4 elements here: the payoff “touching wood” – the music produced by a wooden instrument – the setting in a forest – and the product…a mobile phone made (partly) in wood. All of them have been treated in order to be so intertwined, and at the same time they represent an individual experience – a very well done one. You perceive the multisensory connections only later, ’cause appartently you are watching a very very cool video, nothing more…

The result is, you can hear the wood through the pre-existing music that has been chosen (no tailored sound branding here) and the forest soundscape. And you can feel the touch of the product through the sound. You can almost smell the forest through the soundscape.

So here you have a complete multisensory experience conveyed by a multimedia product: the forest, the music, the wood/ the smell, the sound, the touch. All this elements brings your perception towards the product, and the brand.

This is a really subtle and very very well done, exciting, amazing campaign. great job. great concept, and amazing realization.

And if you want to know more..take a look at the post by Tim Wood from Truly Deeply!

The power of the product (sound) design: a matter of character

I’ve been reading Bruno Munari’s work “Design as Art” – that, btw, is originally called “Arte come mestiere” which sounds exactly the opposite in Italian than the English translation! Anyway, it’s making me see clearly how the evolution of Design in the XXth century is reflected now in the evolution of sound design and especially in product sound design and what we here at Lorelei call product sound branding.

Munari says, talking about advertising campaigns for everyday products and appliances: “(not the campaing) but the product should have character and personality, should be immediatly recognised”. If you have a product with a strong character, with personality (which is for him, of course, a good design) , the communication needs only to be coherent with that – and the message will follow.

What about sound? Well, it’s exactly the same. The sound of a product – feedback sounds for house appliances, mechanical sounds for cars, artificial sounds for mobile phones – have to add value to the character and personality of the product. This value becomes the sonic signature, the sonic character of your product. And there’s a name for that: the sonic logo.

The sonic logo is always thought of something that can be added – if one has money to spend – at the end of a commercial, matched with the visual logo. But if the sound signature is in the product, and a natural, essential part of it…well, when you will hear it again on TV, you will think of the product, and not of the artist that created the sound, immediately forgetting the product and the brand.

You need examples? The commercial for Nissan Qashqai:

Every time I heard it I said: great sound! indeed, it’s Amon Tobin. In fact it’s Amon Tobin, not Nissan.
There’s a huge new world opening up here that could lead to a coherent soundscape for cars with suited feedback internal sounds and external sounds – in the product and consequently on TV or web channels.

And the good one…could anyone please find something else?

so when you hear it here:

you think of the original product. From product sound design to product sound branding.
That is to say, if the sound logo is IN your product AND consequently at the end of the commercial (or in your merchandise, or anywhere else), you save time and money for it to be recognised.

Sound and Food: connect your perceptions

We are working at a new product where food and sound are deeply connected…and we’re having a great time!

There’s a lot to know about the synesthetic and cross-modal perception of food and sound. The Cross-Modal Research Lab from Oxford University with Prof. Charles Spence – whom we had the pleasure to meet at the Audio Branding Congress in Hamburg – are doing a lot of research in the field, with really interesting results.

From that and other recent research, and with a passion for good food and good sounds,we are givign birth to a new project. You will know more very soon.

In the meantime, watch-hear-smell-taste and touch this great short film – Synesthesia by Terry Timely