Product Sound Experience.

You often talk about the look and feel of a product. But what about how it sounds? Semcon’s offer within Product Sound Experience combines our expertise, creating a design strategy to make technology sound as good as possible. 

Sound is an important part of the user experience. If implemented correctly, it strengthens a product’s brand identity by affecting the emotional responses of the users, enhances a product’s user interface or optimizes the information flow. One example of this is using sound in multimodal information and warning signals in cars.

Developing a product with good sound quality is not as simple as just fitting it with a loudspeaker. The product’s sound experience should be a natural ingredient during all product development stages, from concept studies to final product. Everything from sourcing of components and acoustic design to sound design and final system testing.

Semcon’s Product Sound Experience offering includes:

• Electroacoustic components and sourcing
• Hardware design
• Acoustic design and prototyping
• Telecom and accessories
• Programming and signal processing
• Psychoacoustics
• Sound design and evaluations

Sound design – creating sound for different user needs

One important part of Product Sound Experience is sound design – the art and practice of creating intentional sounds, which target the product’s end users. However, it requires that the audio hardware and acoustic design are optimized to reproduce the sound in a good way. Therefore, within Product Sound Experience, sound design can be seen as the “final step”, implemented when the audio hardware has been optimized.

As a result of many years of research and customer projects, Semcon has developed a robust methodology for designing sounds. This methodology is based on an iterative design approach adopted from visual design, and has been empirically tested in several publications.

Semcon sound design methodology:

A large number of products produce sounds that are questionable from a user’s perspective. Using the Semcon sound design methodology, this can be improved.

Listen to how Semcon can design sounds for a couple of existing products.

In this example we have taken a microwave oven sound example followed by an improved version: