Why the best product sound designers come from the wrong background.

When companies look for someone to design how their product sounds, they look for audio engineers. Someone who knows frequencies, decibel levels, speaker specifications. What they actually need is someone who has spent years studying how sound changes the way people feel, act, and trust. That's not an engineering skill. It's a theatrical one.

The expertise gap

Product sound design sits at an uncomfortable intersection. The technical side — codecs, middleware, DSP, embedded systems — is engineering. But the actual design question — what should this product feel like when you're near it? — is not an engineering question. It's a question about human perception, emotion, and behavior. And the people who have spent the most time with those questions are not engineers.

They're composers who know that a half-second pause changes the meaning of everything after it. Theatre directors who understand that the sound before the actor enters shapes how the audience reads the character. Game audio designers who build adaptive systems where sound responds to player behavior in real time. Film sound designers who know that what you don't hear is often more powerful than what you do.

These disciplines have centuries of accumulated knowledge about how sound shapes human experience. Product design has barely started to tap into it.

What a drummer and a robot have in common

In 2020, we built a machine-learning character called Parzival for a live performance. In one experiment, a drummer improvised with the system in real time. The machine responded to rhythm, intensity, and timing — not perfectly, not predictably, but with something that felt like musical taste.

What surprised us wasn't the technology. It was how quickly the musician stopped treating it as a tool and started treating it as a fellow player. The interaction worked because the machine had behavioral patterns — tendencies, preferences, a kind of character. The drummer could anticipate it, challenge it, play with it.

This is exactly the relationship a person should have with a well-designed product. Not a tool that executes commands, but a counterpart that communicates. And the skills needed to create that — timing, responsiveness, the ability to design behavior that feels alive without being intrusive — come directly from performance, not from engineering.

It's telling that this project was partly funded by an automotive machine-learning lab. They saw the connection before we made it explicit: the principles of live musical interaction are the same principles that make an adaptive sound system feel natural in a vehicle.

See also: Why generative AI changes everything about product sound →

The restraint problem

For an orchestral soundwalk with the Münchner Philharmoniker, we mapped Holst's "The Planets" onto a public park — 13 simultaneous 3D audio sources, real-time binaural rendering on a smartphone. The original concept was gamified: a virtual spaceship, interactive elements at every turn.

We threw it away. The music was powerful enough to carry the experience on its own. The spaceship competed with Holst. The best design decision was everything we removed.

This is the hardest lesson for product sound: the temptation is always to add more. More feedback sounds, more variation, more cleverness. But the products people genuinely enjoy are the ones where the sound never competes with the experience it supports. A great startup chime can become iconic because people love it. But a product that constantly shows off its sonic capabilities becomes exhausting within minutes.

Knowing when to be silent — and how to be silent gracefully — is a skill that comes from composing music, directing theatre, designing the arc of an experience. Not from optimizing audio parameters.

Spatial sound is emotional design

Standing inside an orchestra — next to the brass, behind the timpani — the sound is direct, aggressive, full of transients that put you in a state of heightened alertness. From the concert hall, the same music arrives softened by distance and reverb: calmer, more contemplative. Same music. Same moment. Completely different emotional experience — determined entirely by spatial position.

We learned this studying orchestral acoustics, and it changed how we think about every product. In a car with a surround system, a warning about another road user can come from the direction where that road user actually is — and the perceived distance of the sound can reflect the actual distance. Close sounds urgent. Far sounds informational. The spatial design of the sound carries the meaning, without a word, without a visual, without the driver looking away from the road.

This kind of thinking — where the position and distance of a sound is the information — comes from decades of spatial audio work in concert halls, opera houses, and immersive installations. It doesn't come from reading a speaker specification sheet.

Art runs on deadlines too

There's a persistent myth that artistic backgrounds mean impractical people. That hiring someone from theatre or music means getting someone who doesn't understand timelines, budgets, or delivery.

The opera that founded our studio was a 130,000 EUR production with a budget gap, five shows, an abandoned industrial site with no infrastructure, and a custom AR app that had to work on audience smartphones in real time. Fourteen artists, fifteen technicians, hard delivery date. It sold out from show three onward — 1,500 tickets, 25% above target.

It wasn't run like an art project. It was run like a product launch: audience segmentation, pricing strategy, distribution partnerships, and a deadline that couldn't move. Artistic rigour and industrial discipline are not opposed. They're the same thing applied to different materials.

The wrong background is the right one

An audio engineer can implement any sound you specify. But who specifies it? Who decides that the robot's approach sound should feel like a gentle announcement rather than a warning? Who knows that the pause before a spoken response needs to feel different for a casual question than for a serious one? Who understands that the silence between interactions is as important as the interactions themselves?

These are not technical questions. They are questions about how humans experience presence, timing, tension, and release — through sound. And the people who have the deepest training in those questions come from backgrounds that look, on paper, like they have nothing to do with product development.

Until you realize that designing how a machine communicates with a person is, at its core, the same problem as designing how a character communicates with an audience. The stage has changed. The craft hasn't.