The phrase “pleasant noise” may sound oxymoronic, but many companies are working to create just this to make the click of a camera or the thump of a motorcycle sound noisy but still pleasant to the ear.

Explaining this, Mr Dominic Gallello, President and CEO of California-based MSC Software Corporation, said, “When you buy a $1,000 camera, you want the shutter release to sound like a $1,000 camera.” In order to achieve this, MSC, a computer aided engineering company, acquired acoustics company Free Field Technologies on September 6, 2011.

This company's software, said Mr Gallello, will help MSC's customers to simulate the sound made by the products that they build, for instance, a car company can simulate the sound made by the tyres on the road, the wind hitting the windscreen, and the sound of the AC even before building the car. While this can help in reducing noise, the same technology can also be used by companies to alter sound and make it more pleasant, said Mr Gallello.

While MSC makes software used for design – for instance, its software is used by companies such as UK-based System Design Evaluation Ltd to design weapons for the US F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft and by Dongfeng Peugeot Citroen Automobile Company for mechanical and electronic simulation – Mr Gallello said that the acquisition of Free Field Technologies makes sense because MSC was involved with anything related to simulation of physics on a computer. “We have hired 20 PhDs in the last twelve months to study these things. The math involved in studying and simulating what happens to a plane when it struck by lightning when it is banking at 2,000 feet are immense,” he said.

Simulation is getting more important these days because pleasing the customer is critical in every industry, said Mr Gallello. The company counts Boeing among its customers and Mr Gallello said that in the company's 787, the marketing team had as much say as the design and engineering team because they wanted to please their customers. “Boeing hired a psychologist to study what users felt about a journey on a plane and when they asked people, the first thing that they said about the experience on a plane was, ‘I can't wait to get off the plane'.”

MSC, which was founded in 1963, is known for MSC Nastran, which was released in 1971 and based upon a general purpose structural analysis program that it developed for NASA. The company, which was earlier listed, was delisted in 2009 after being acquired by Symphony Technology Group, a private equity firm.

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