As brands embrace sonic branding and sound design for their products, is the world becoming louder?

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We had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Adobe on what good audio user experiences should sound like:

Follow the link for the full read: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/perspectives/wireframe-podcast/ui-sound-design-audio-feedback-enhances-ux-episode-10/

When The Guardian asked the question, “How should electric vehicles sound?” it showed that the conversation around EV sound design is no longer limited to engineers and regulators. It is now part of the cultural dialogue. As vehicles transition from roaring combustion engines to near-silent electric motors, sound becomes both a safety necessity and a branding opportunity.

How Should Electric Vehicles Sound? A Sound Designer’s Perspective

For a sound designer, this is not just an interesting debate. It is a fundamental design challenge that will shape the future of mobility.

The Dual Purpose of EV Sound

Unlike traditional cars, electric vehicles are nearly silent at low speeds. On one hand, this silence creates a serene driving experience. On the other, it poses serious safety concerns for pedestrians, cyclists, and especially people who are visually impaired. That is why regulations now require EVs to emit artificial sounds at low speeds.

But safety is only half of the equation. The other half is experience. Sound can define how a vehicle feels to drive, how it reflects its brand, and how it connects emotionally with its owner. The same way an engine’s growl once signaled power, a carefully designed EV soundscape can signal innovation, calm, or futuristic elegance.

Branding Through Sound

Brands have always understood the power of visual identity. Logos, typefaces, and colors are carefully managed. Audio is just as important. Consider how recognizable the Netflix “ta-dum” or the Apple startup chime has become. Those two seconds of sound carry massive cultural weight.

For EV manufacturers, the sounds of acceleration, startup, and even in-cabin chimes are opportunities to build a unique sonic signature. Imagine a brand where the acceleration tone subtly reflects its sustainability mission with a sound inspired by nature. Contrast that with a brand that emphasizes speed and performance through sharper, more synthetic textures.

Sound is a brand asset. It is memory, identity, and emotion all wrapped in one.

Design Considerations for EV Sound

Designing sound for electric vehicles is not as simple as layering effects on top of silence. It is a process that blends art, psychology, and acoustics. Some of the most important considerations include:

• Cultural context: Sounds are interpreted differently across regions. What feels calming in one culture may feel unsettling in another.
• Emotional resonance: Should the soundscape lean synthetic, natural, or even human? A flute tone evokes softness and tradition. A synthesized hum conveys futurism.
• User experience integration: The sound cannot be an afterthought. It must blend seamlessly into the UX of driving, from startup tones to wayfinding alerts.
• Practicality: Sounds need to be noticeable without being intrusive. A balance between awareness and comfort is essential.

The Guardian article explored ideas like flutes, synths, and even the human voice. Each suggestion raises an important truth: the sound of EVs is not just a technical detail. It is a creative decision that impacts brand, culture, and safety all at once.

Our Take on EV Sound

Too often, the conversation stops at safety. Vehicles must alert pedestrians, but the bigger opportunity is to create a holistic sonic ecosystem that strengthens a brand at every touchpoint.

As sound designers, we view EV sound not as a regulatory requirement but as a canvas. It is a space where a company can differentiate, connect emotionally, and define the feeling of its product. Designing these sounds requires both creativity and restraint. The audio must be unique, but it also has to fade into the background of everyday driving in a natural way.

When approached thoughtfully, an EV’s soundscape can become as iconic as its silhouette. It can become a defining feature of its brand.

Designing the Future of EV Sound

The Guardian asked, “How should EVs sound?” The truth is, there is no single answer. Every brand deserves its own approach. A luxury EV should not sound like a performance EV. A sustainability-focused car should not sound like a technology-driven one.

The question is not just what electric vehicles should sound like, but how sound can become a deliberate part of the brand experience.

As the world transitions to electric mobility, we have a chance to design the future of automotive sound with intention. Done right, EV soundscapes will make streets safer, enrich driver experiences, and give brands new ways to connect.

At Connor Moore Sound, we specialize in creating audio identities that go beyond function. We build sound as a brand asset. If your company is exploring electric mobility or wants to design a sonic signature that stands out, let’s talk.

Check out the article here >

Sound is an integral component of the product experience, and if designed through the brand lens, it can also be used across product marketing to bring commercials to life and tie directly back to the product experience.

Sound design has the power to create a tangible bond between consumers and their favorite brands. By leveraging the psychology of sound, marketers can craft experiences that evoke nostalgia, comfort, urgency, or excitement.

Integrate sound seamlessly into your branding strategy by taking a closer look at the role of sound design in product marketing.

Building Emotional Connections and Brand Affinity

Sound has a profound capacity to elicit emotional responses. In product marketing, this means the right sound can tap into a customer’s deep-seated desires and memories. The right sound design ensures your customers feel a positive response anytime they power on their devices or receive a notification. If you carry these sounds across your marketing campaigns, they can boost recall and affinity outside of just the product experience. This feeling can echo through your marketing to help create a unique and iconic brand.

For example, at CMoore Sound, we worked with Peloton to create their product sound ecosystem and startup sound, which became a sound logo for the whole brand. Sound design is incredibly versatile and paints a vivid picture for your customers. Our experts in UX sound design work with brands to find the perfect soundscape for their products because it makes a profound difference. Not only does it make products sound better, but it also impacts how brands can build affinity with consumers.

Enhancing the User Experience and Powerful Storytelling

Well-designed product sounds are primarily created to increase functionality and boost accessibility within the product experience, but they’re also an opportunity to add delight and help tell the brand story.

Whether it’s the evocative soundscapes of luxury car brands such as Lucid Motors or the acoustic soundscape of a Google device, a product’s sound design plays a key role in enhancing functionality and supporting brand.

A consistent and distinct audio presence is key to not only being heard but also remembered. When synchronized with the visual components of a campaign, sound can serve as the glue that binds the narrative together, amplifying the emotional impact. A key role of sound design in product marketing is showcasing your brand and product story, ensuring your sonic branding becomes a beacon of reliability to customers.

Showcasing Your Values

Strategic sound design should be an integral part of your brand and product experience, supporting your brand values. This allows you to tailor your storytelling to make the right impression that is cohesive with your ideal brand positioning.

Using stock sounds in a product or advertisement alienates more than it engages and can disassociate people from your curated brand experience. Instead, you should aim to use the sounds consumers have come to know across marketing to build trust and affinity for your product and brand.

So, how do you strike the perfect balance? While it’s crucial to be audible, do so with a level of subtleness and alignment with your brand’s values. Creating a successful sound design plan requires being true to the message of your brand, whether your sound design prioritizes a feeling of luxury, innovation, excitement, or something else entirely. Reinvent your product sound design today to refine the user experience and start engaging with more customers.

Sound design is integral to ensuring products are accessible to a massive range of people with unique needs. We see sound as a tool in the multimodal tool kit that you can use alongside visuals and haptics to create more informative, intentional experiences that can be beneficial to a large range of users.

Through intentional sound design, products can become more inclusive, providing auditory cues that guide users in their interaction with technology. This approach enhances usability for people with specific auditory, visual, or neurodivergent needs. It also improves overall user experience by offering alternative ways to receive information. Ensuring sound design is accessible involves understanding the diverse needs of users and implementing solutions that address these needs. Find out the essential ways sound can make products more accessible so that you can tailor your design to serve as many customers as possible.

Establishing an Accessible Identity

Sound design has evolved to encompass a broader spectrum of auditory experiences to achieve true inclusivity, utilizing a variety of pitches, intensities, instrumentation, and delivery methods to communicate with all users. With a more intentional approach, sound experiences should be specifically designed for each interaction and pleasant enough to not distract from the product experience. Most importantly, these sounds should reflect your brand and the emotions you want to evoke in the user.

Our case study with Hello Sense shows how we created their sound identity while building an ecosystem of sound that supports a range of customers. Creating alarms that start gently with minimal volume or complexity softly wakes light sleepers. As the alarms develop over time, they become more musical and complex to wake heavy sleepers, providing a spectrum of design that supports diverse needs.

Multimodal Design Systems

Providing feedback through multiple sensory channels can enhance accessibility for users with different needs. Certain interactions are best presented through visuals, haptics, or sound—sometimes a combination of two or three of these. Get a strong understanding of the context of the situation and use the medium that is most effective to notify or alert users so that it’s not overly weighted in sound.

Sensory-Friendly Design

Sound design should consider users with sensory sensitivities. Avoiding sudden, loud, or jarring sounds can make products more accessible to users with sensory-processing disorders or autism-spectrum disorders. Rather than using high-pitched, percussive tones, consider adding a light sweep at the beginning of sounds that ease into the peak of the sound so as not to cause alarm or fatigue.

Clear and Consistent Design

Consistency in sound design is essential for users with neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD or autism, and it also benefits the brand in terms of recognition and recall. Using clear, consistent, and predictable auditory cues helps users understand how the product works and reduces cognitive load.

User Customization

Offering users the ability to customize sound settings according to their preferences can also enhance accessibility. This might include volume control, the ability to turn off specific sounds, or the option to replace default sounds with ones that are more easily distinguishable or preferable to the user and their specific needs.

Overall, sound design can play a crucial role in making product experiences more accessible by providing additional sensory information and feedback that complements visual interfaces, making them more inclusive and usable for a wider range of users.

Expanding Your Testing Phase

The ways that sound makes products more accessible may seem straightforward at first, but you can measure your success during the testing phase. It’s critical to test products for many reasons, and one should be determining how accessible your product is.

Put your product in the hands of a range of users with different needs so that you can evaluate their experience. These evaluations offer invaluable feedback, highlighting areas where sound design can evolve from merely accessible to deeply intuitive and inclusive. Leveraging real human experiences ensures that every alert, notification, or chime genuinely enhances usability for everyone.

Start working with an audio expert today to develop products that hit your audience’s ears perfectly. At CMoore Sound, our sound design agency develops a wide range of user experiences across many products using carefully curated audio cues. Work with an expert who understands your auditory needs and can bring your vision of an accessible, quality product to life.

Sound has always been a part of the product experience. Whether it be the ringing of a telephone or the dial on an old telephone, sound has served a functional purpose of grabbing a users attention or reinforcing an action. As technology has advanced, engineers have been able to get rid of most mechanical noise made by products and the alerts and sounds that were once purely functional are now more curated and customized to the product or brand. What was once a really loud buzzer to signal that your laundry was dry can now be a much softer sound that won’t  cause stress or annoyance. The ringing of phones and alarms once sounded the same and tended to be extremely loud and obnoxious for their purely functional purpose, but now can be customized to the user or the brand. Even car engine sounds are changing with the mass adoption of EV’s. As EV’s become more prevalent, the soundscape around traffic is changing and has the opportunity to become more unique and potentially/hopefully quieter. Across all of these different products, apps and experiences with AR, VR or XR provide an opportunity to curate our soundscapes in a more intentional way. 

Over the last several years, the interest and demand of using sound as a more strategic component to branding has increased dramatically. In the past, sound branding was just seen in the form of the sonic logo. Today, brands are starting to understand the value of using sound branding in the form of ux sound for their products, apps and experiences. As this growth in demand is happening, I’ve become more and more aware of how important it is for sound to be used judiciously in these experiences. As new products, apps and experiences enter the marketplace, the natural conclusion is to think that our soundscapes will get dramatically louder. This could very well prove to be true if not approached correctly and this is why it is more important now than ever for brands to be thinking strategically about curating the sound for these experiences. So, what should designers be considering in order to create more effective sound experiences that won’t add to the noise? 

Less is Often More

People are very sensitive to sound — the last thing you want to do in a product experience is overuse sound. This tends to create an annoying user experience that increases listener fatigue and actually makes the experience less effective. Using sound in products needs to be a very strategic process where guardrails are set for best practices that help to guide how, when and where sound will be used. Sound is the spice in the mix that should add a layer of depth, not call too much attention to itself.

Brand Opportunity

Creating sound for products, apps and experiences is all about striking a balance between enhancing functionality while boosting brand awareness. Get a strong understanding of the brand and how it wants to express itself while also researching the products and brands in the competitive market to develop ideas on how you can differentiate and stand out. What are the brand or design principles? What is the roadmap for future products and how can you harmonize the experiences? Try to find key moments that you can lean on in order to align the visual and sound experience to enhance the overall brand narrative.

Boost Accessibility

Sound can be added as a tool in the larger multi modal toolkit to support visuals and haptics in a user experience. Adding sound that is rooted in psychoacoustics and music theory will help in creating a more informative and functional experience to a range of users. The key with this is to not overuse sound, but use sparingly alongside visual or haptic cues to not cause fatigue or confusion.

Spectrum of Design

Different interactions in a user experience require different types of attention and should be structured and designed that way. In the automotive space, a seatbelt chime is a very different type of alert than a forward collision warning or a welcome sound. These should all be designed specific to the intent of the communication on a spectrum that is specifically created for the experience being designed.

Build in Flexibility

When creating sound for a product, the team should consider how the sound experience will translate outside of this specific context. Hopefully, the brand will be able to use some of these sounds for marketing purposes for television and digital content. If this is the case, designers should have ideas on how ux sounds can be more dynamic and robust for marketing efforts. Some brands have multiple products with different speakers and contexts that sounds need to scale to – Designers and brands need to consider those playback systems and ask the question of how can they maintain a quality and cohesion across multiple touchpoints and products.

Understand the Capabilities

Every product experience is unique with different environments they live in and different speakers or playback systems. It’s very important to understand the context of the environment and speaker so you can design specifically for the limitations. Get a speaker spec from the brand as soon as possible and make sure to begin design with those frequencies as a guide. Lastly, try to get your design into a build of the product or app early in the design process to see how things are working on the device so you can get ahead of iterating for real life experience.

Sonic Testing

There are typically many stakeholders involved in the design process and getting them on board with the creative concepts is obviously an important part of the process, but you should also consider testing with a third party to get an objective review of how sounds are being perceived at scale. Having a larger test group of varying demographics can help to show how the sounds are communicating certain brand principles while also ensuring that the sounds are communicating the correct intent from a functionality perspective.