How Engineers Create Artificial Sounds to Fool Us
5th July 2012
Many of the sounds we hear every day are entirely fabricated by engineers to persuade us to buy things.
Hundreds of items have their acoustics deliberately tweaked to make us happy, according to Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford.
The dastards. Oh, sorry … I was thinking of journalists. Carry on.
July 5th, 2012 at 07:32
When the first electronic telephone sets (land-line variety) appeared, the handset was very light; there was really nothing more to it than a plastic shell and the electronic pickup. Consumers complained that the phones were ‘cheap’ and ‘chintzy’ and wouldn’t buy them. So the manufacturers started gluing lugnuts or other chunks of metal inside the receiver casing to give it more ‘heft’. They had nothing to do with the quality or function of the unit, but the complaints went away and sales took off.
Sometimes the old ways are best.
July 5th, 2012 at 12:05
The company I worked for after college bought a Wang word processing system. (It was a piece of junk, even at that time.) Secretaries had a terrible time transitioning from the IBM Selectrics and would often mistype multiple characters throughout the document. Wang got around that by installing a sound card that would produce the familiar key click of a typewriter. They didn’t tell the secretaries, but they did let us know that there was a volume knob discretely located on the back of the unit. We would turn the volume down slightly over a period of a few weeks until they no longer needed that “click” to know they’d hit a key.