Mobile melodies: Made in the studio for your devices

The sterile silence of the mixing and mastering studio spoke louder than a thousand words as we entered. The recording studio was right across from it, complete with a majestic grand piano and other musical instruments in all their glory, waiting to burst with melodies they held within. To top it all, there was a smaller studio used mostly for vocal recording and another even smaller room treated so it absorbs all sound — even the softest of whispers. The best part? This wasn’t a recording studio at a top audio company. It was Samsung’s sound lab, at their R&D Centre in Seoul, South Korea.

Ringtones and alerts have surreptitiously made themselves a part of our lives, and not just on our phones. For example, a lot of the sharp music that plays on certain cars when they reverse is based on ringtones and ad jingles. And most of us will remember how the Nokia tone and its message alert tone — that set of eight shrill beeps — became so common back in the day.

But it was surprising to find out, as on that visit to Samsung’s sound lab, that so much detail and research goes into coming up with these jingles and tones on our mobiles that we are so used to. And to drive home the message of its meticulous sound design, Samsung started off this session of sorts by playing a scene from the movie ‘ Gravity’ . Sandra Bullock’s protagonist manages to escape despite the screen reading in the Chinese language because of the “universal language of sound design”, as Samsung’s sound designer put it.

Sonic branding is an important aspect in consumer technology. Devices such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, etc, are such an integral part of our daily lives, even the sounds they make are ingrained. A case in point is the easily-recognisable Windows theme that may of us all grew up with.

In Samsung’s case, the company has different melodies for different products, but they all sound similar. And they are all based on Samsung’s ‘Beyond The Horizon’ theme (for home appliances, since 2015) and ‘Over The Horizon’ (for electronic mobile devices), since 2012.

Not that the themes have stayed static — the company improvises on them with new device launches. For instance, with the launch of the S8 phone earlier this year, Samsung worked with UK’s Jacob Collier, who went on to win Grammies, to create an ‘Over The Horizon’ theme that would be in sync with millenials. In 2016, for the S7, Samsung worked with Jazz musicians for that year’s theme — Fusion jazz.

But here’s the most interesting bit: The way Samsung comes up with sounds and tones for various functions on its smartphones is based very much on our daily, ‘non-digital’ lives. The ‘knock’ or ‘dull tap’ sound on Samsung Galaxy smartphones came about after the sound designer knocked on different surfaces and decided to use the sound he heard when he knocked on wood.

Quite something, right? It gets better. The ‘click’ users hear when they use Samsung Pay is made to sound like the sound you hear when a credit or a debit card is removed from a POS machine. And this might be the most obvious of them all, but the camera shutter sound that you hear on clicking a picture is taken from the sound produced on Samsung’s NX20 camera, which had the highest rated shutter sound.

Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Note 8 comes with the indispensable S Pen, a stylus that can be used to draw, write, and doodle on the phone. So, it only seemed fitting that the ringtones to go with this phone were composed with something that has come to be known as ‘pen beating’. This refers to music being produced by tapping the different components of a pen and Samsung worked with 14-year-old Jinyoung Choi, whose pen beating videos went viral online, to make them.

There are also key takeaways from sound design and music theory that are integral to Samsung’s sound design — such as the temperature UP sound in air conditioners, which is a high pitch, and the temperature DOWN sound, a low pitch. Another example is how the company uses the Moderato tempo (medium speed) beat for the Gear S3 smartwatches. Moderato was arrived upon after multiplying the number of seconds in a minute (60) by two, giving you 120. One hundred and twenty beats per minute in music falls under Moderato, which is not too fast, but not too slow either.

Oh, here’s a fun fact for us Indians. An employee from Samsung’s facility in Bengaluru was flown down to Seoul to help develop Indian-themed sounds for Samsung’s Z Series mobile phones — making India the only country to specifically have an influence on Samsung’s sound design.

So the next time your phone rings or your air conditioner beeps, it would be nice to recall that it is a musical experience created especially for users and not just a bunch of random sounds thrown together.

The writer was in Seoul at the invitation of Samsung

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