Product Music by Gabriella Cerrato

Stop reading now, please. Listen.

What do you hear? Can you identify specific components in the ambient noise? Unless you are in the Death Valley which, of course, is highly unlikely if you are reading this, you are surrounded by all sorts of mechanical and electrical products, each of them with its distinctive noise. The noise that a product makes is also called its acoustic signature. Many things about a product can be learned by detailed inspection of its acoustic signature. And different products have different acoustic signatures which we use to identify them.

What I find most interesting however is how we perceive and react to different products based on the noise they generate. Why does this car sound sportier, more aggressive perhaps, than the other one which has comparable engine and performance? Why do we find this vacuum cleaner less annoying than the other one? The engineering answer to these questions is the ultimate goal of the sound quality specialist. Sound quality engineers dissect the acoustic signature of theirs and competitive products, compare them both subjectively and objectively and define the ideal� (or target) signature that would make their product sound better so that more people would buy it. In the end, it is all about marketing. Let's face it, Sound Quality engineering is just a means to a marketing end. And as such, it is very important. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has a committee for Sound Quality (Working Group 36 of Noise (S12)). There are also many papers on the subject of Sound Quality of products, mainly in the Internoise, NoiseCon and SAE conferences proceedings. There are not many books however with the right mix of theory and application. My personal favorite is with no doubt 'Signals, Sound and Sensation' by prof. William Hartmann, Springer-Verlag, 1997.Â

Because the topic of Sound Quality is so important for engineers at every stage of the product design and development cycle, we thought it would be useful to create a library of sounds illustrating different products noises and specific sound quality features. So, in the near future we will add a Library of Sounds that you will be able to listen to, download and analyze with your own set of tools.