Sound Culture | Auditory brand staging of cultural brands

Brand sounds are always the expression of a characteristic corporate culture,“ emphasizes Carl-Frank Westermann, managing director at WESOUND Berlin in his keynote speech. This applies just as much for cultural brands
as all companies have a sound, for example via their telephone waiting loop, image film, virtual speech assistant or even the sound of a haptic or digital product or announcements in a cultural institution. Sound can create identity and open up new communication channels.

A lot more is possible when employing sound than simply sending monodirectional messages to passive receivers. Sound in its diversity encompasses all auditory sounds, music and voice and is an intrinsic part of both everyday, but also more unusual worlds of work and experience. From atmospheric to informative to dialogical, there are many ways how the customer experience or in this case user/visitor experience in the cultural environment can be sustainably influenced by sound

Urban Sound Culture – How does your city sound?

In his keynote speech,Dr. Cornelius Ringe , managing director of WESOUND Hamburg, challenged representatives of city marketing, urban development and other cultural and environmental authorities to raise their consciousness to the sound of their cities. On the one hand, this is about the acoustic quality in cities – a factor that influences the life quality and health of the citizens On the other hand, there is an enormous communicative potential that is being neglected, if you understand that the sound of a city can create identity. For example in the city of Hamburg, the port, the Reeperbahn or the Elbe Philharmonic, are places of interest with a characteristic and recognizable sound that represent the city through digital channels worldwide.

To Prof. Jens Bley, founder of eCultureLab at the HafenCity University Hamburg, this approach was very helpful for his project on digital cultural storytelling in cities. For example, sound will be applied to bring the „Smart Square“ in Hamburg’s city centre to life.

BamBam Sound Performance – Feel the Sound

WESOUND provided an artistic approach to sound with the live acts by Benny Hofer on his drum machine BamBam.

The mechanical sequencer BamBam is based on a simple loop principle. Benny uses the steady rotation of an axle to drive drums and other instruments. He intervenes manually into the current mechanics to change rhythm and sound effects. The beats are edited live, looped and breaked Baselines are triggered via switchable sliding contacts of a type of punched card, which corresponds to a midi-capable hurdy-gurdy.