Sonic Branding in Health with Audrey Arbeeny of Audiobrain

VFH Episode 48

In this episode, Teri welcomes Audrey Arbeeny, the Founder/CEO and Emmy Award-Winning Executive Producer/Creative Director for Audiobrain, a globally recognized sonic branding boutique dedicated to the intentional development of music and sound.

Audrey is the brain behind sonic branding and is highly skilled in many areas of sonic branding development and implementation. She oversees Audiobrain’s projects from start to finish, coordinating logistics, strategy, experience design, resources, and talent. In addition, Audrey oversees Audiobrain’s ongoing research in areas of psychoacoustics and biomusicology.

Audiobrain has consistently stayed leaders in this field through innovation, research, education, advanced technological skills, and forward-thinking initiatives for some of the world’s largest brands.

Key points from Audrey!

Her depth and breadth of experience in sound and audio branding.
How the element of sonic branding can have profound impact on people’s health.

Getting into Sonic Branding

Their goal/mission at Audiobrain is to promote and advocate the intentional use of music, sound, and voice to promote health, wellness and well-being. That can be in healthcare or in a device to make experiences better, to not create noise, to be respectful of the end user, and to just make everything sound better.
Audiobrain enabled Audrey to realize her dream of combining her lifelong love of music and science with proven business skills.
Music has long been an important part of Audrey’s life. She began formal piano training at the age of four. She is also an accomplished flutist and studied voice at Carnegie Hall, under the late Silas Engum, for many years.
She also has extensive recording, editing, licensing, interactive, and sonic branding experience.

Brands and Projects

They have done a lot of unified communications projects with IBM.
She worked on the IBM ThinkPad sound.
They worked with Microsoft on the XBox 360.
They work with Holland America Cruise Lines. They just finished expanding the experience on 5 ships in 4 days in Alaska.
She was the music supervisor for the past 7 Olympic Broadcasts for NBC.
She has been the creative director/head of production for the strategic development of brands’ sounds including Virgin Mobile USA, Glaxo Smith Kline, Google, Logitech, Major League Soccer, KIA Motors Corp, The New York Giants, McDonald’s, Merck, and HBO to name a few.

Sonic Branding in Health with Audrey Arbeeny of Audiobrain

Healthcare Applications

Audrey refers to a story about female identical twins that were in an accident and how they used music to communicate.
Audrey has used music on one of her family members who was on a ventilator. Audrey would do music therapy with her because she knew who she really loved, and she loaded an iPod so they could just play music. When the relative came off the ventilator, she said she was tired of Josh Groban songs, because it was all she heard the whole time she was on the ventilator.
Veterans have testified that music makes them feel better.
Music can reach people where other things cannot.
There are many new devices. They just completed a major surgical robot because there are times where the surgeon’s eyes are on a computer and if something is happening behind them, and they need certain alerts, Audiobrain has provided them with the necessary auditory signals.
Audrey’s elderly father has an apnoea machine from Phillips that reports back directly to his physician. He’s got a monitor for his pace maker and other positively impactful devices.

The Thought Process Behind Creating Sonic Branding

They create full holistic sonic branding.
Someone may approach them with a heart health monitor running device. Audiobrain will first of all look at their brand, their aspirations, their touch points, the critical places where they use sound, etc.
They then create a soundscape around that.
There are a series of tools that they create to avoid overwhelming their clients and zero in on what resonates with them. They then start to educate, pull things together, handcraft the various core characteristics and start to evolve the sound.
They just did Logitech’s JayBird which has product personification and overarching branding. They recorded one of the voices within the product for their call center.