5 Clever Ways Products Use Sound To Trick Your Brain

5

VoIP Adds Fake Static Because We Find It Reassuring

The ability to call somebody over the internet is cool and all, but it's not perfect. There's always a quiet hum, like white noise, in the background. It's barely noticeable, and not enough to interfere with the call in any way. If anything, it reminds you that you are in fact in a conversation, and that the audio didn't suddenly cut out just because the other person is taking a very long time to mentally prepare their reply to your marriage proposal. But here's the thing: VoIP could be perfectly clear if the makers wanted it to be. That static sound is added artificially, on your end.

Why? Because users seem to prefer it. The noise makes the call sound a little bit more like what we think calls should sound, based on decades of inferior phone use. Part of the issue is that digital recording is a lot better than phones of yesteryear, and so could sound freakishly clear, but there's more to it. A lot of the time, when you're talking to someone over VoIP, the line transmits absolutely nothing to you, but creates this fake noise, called comfort noise, to trick you into thinking it's doing something.

4

Most TV Animal Noises Are Dubbed In

If you're ever had the misfortune of watching golf on TV, you know that sometimes the commentators stop talking and there's just a terminally awkward spell of birdsong and wind. During the PGA Championship in 2000, alert viewers discovered something off about these sounds: One bird heard on the broadcast was a white-throated sparrow, which wasn't native to Kentucky in the summer (where and when the game took place). "And you said my interests in birding and golf made me boring!" said one hypothetical viewer. "But look at me now! I uncovered a FRAUD!"

3

Acoustic Technicians Manipulate All Sorts Of Car Sounds

We're all vaguely aware of why cars make noise. There's an internal combustion engine, there are parts that suck, squeeze, bang, and blow, and that sort of thing can make quite a racket when you're not careful. But car technology has been advancing every year, so if we didn't want engines to be so loud, they no longer would be. We do want engines to be loud, though, so we make those suckers loud ... artificially. In the case of electric cars, we're even forced to by law, lest silent vehicles mow down pedestrians who have no other way to know when one's coming, like visually impaired people.

With some cars, manufacturers make them loud to suit buyers who think the loudest cars are the most powerful ones. Harley Davidson counts on you revving up your engine and blasting everyone behind you in gaseous testosterone, and when Japanese competitors started making motorcycles that sounded similar, Harley tried to get their sound trademarked. When BMW and Ford found that their engines weren't throaty enough, they turned to active noise control, pumping in extra engine noises through the car speakers.

Having V8 engine noises coming very obviously out of speakers comes across as fake, but your car doesn't resort to that sort of thing, right? Maybe it does, but handled a little more elegantly. Say, if the turbocharger reduces the engine noise too much, they'll tweak the exhaust to push it back up. They'll mess with the cylinders to add a more metallic flavor. Manufacturers have aural engineers who work in studios comparing possible configurations. One, says an engineer, might sound like a dull pop song, another like something smooth from Kanye West, and another rougher, "a bit of a dizzy rascal."

2

The "Pouring A Soda" Sound Was Electronic

Picture how it sounds to pour out an ice-cold glass of Coca-Cola. You probably imagine a very distinct sound of liquid sloshing out of the bottle in a series of glugs, and then bubbles popping, getting louder as the beverage's level rises. Now actually go pour some Coke into a glass. You'll notice, to your horror, that there's actually not much of a sound at all. Sure, there'll be a fizz as soon as you unscrew the cap, but when you actually pour it, the bubbles don't make anywhere near that much noise. Unless you put your ear right up to the glass, and then you're a person listening intently to your drink, which makes you seem a tad off.

The sound you associate with Coke was created by advertising folks. The Coca-Cola Company calls it the "pop and pour." It isn't even a recording of a heavily amplified actual pour, but a sound totally synthesized electronically, and it was made in the '70s, when synthesizing sounds electronically was a strange and frightening new technology, probably the work of witches.

1

Snapple Spent Years Getting Plastic Bottles To Pop Like Glass Ones

After a long time selling their beverages in glass bottles, Snapple recently started making the shift to plastic. Considering some of the complaints people have recently raised against single-use plastics (like straws, or worse, coffee stirrers), this might sound like an awful, backward decision, but from the company's standpoint, plastic has a lot of advantages over glass. The big one is weight. Using PET saves a ton on freight costs and greatly reduces energy consumption. Plastic also tends not to shatter. That means less loss to breakage, fewer toes injured by dropped bottles, and virtually no deaths from blood loss after stepping on shards.

But customers were so used to getting Snapple in glass bottles that the company figured they might respond to any kind of change with misplaced fury and thunder. So they aimed to make the new plastic bottles as similar to the glass ones as they could. The biggest challenge with that was getting the caps to pop when you first open them.

Popping is something most metal caps on glass bottles do naturally, but screw caps on plastic bottles don't. It happens in glass bottles because of air pressure and the fact that the bottle is totally rigid, but that goes away when you switch to flexible plastic. So Snapple engineers set about figuring out how to keep the pop, and the process took years. The final product featured a vacuum within the bottle, used extra thick walls, kept a specific liquid level to maintain a minimum amount of removal torque, and distributed the capping force through lugs without deforming the plastic finish ... and that's just the engineering stuff we can understand well enough to relate.