Can Sound Designers Overcome the Popularity of the Mute Button?

The ad industry should be well aware of the power of strong sound design. It’s a crucial tool for immersion, sets moods, guides scenes, and enhances audience engagement, all while amplifying a project’s memorability when done correctly. Talk about a vital responsibility!

Unfortunately, lately, it feels as though the fruits of sound are often too easily overlooked. Many audience members – especially those in the gen z demographic – have fallen in love with the mute button, opting to engage with content that is soundless and drip-fed to them in subtitles. This phenomenon has confused the industry – who wouldn’t want to watch something with sound on? – and has made the point of a project harder to communicate. Besides, the hard work of sound designers goes underappreciated, brands don’t get their messages across as intended, and consumers don’t get to have an optimal viewing experience. It’s a lose-lose-lose scenario.

LBB’s Jordan Won Neufeldt wanted to find out what could be done about this situation, so, she spoke to various industry experts to discuss the root problem, how brand and sound designers can work together to reclaim sound, and the importance of using sonic craft to engage audiences through their ears.

Alistair Bolt

Senior sound engineer at Forever Audio

All too often, sound is an afterthought, and its potential power is overlooked. In no time at all and with a few strategic sound effects, a talented sound designer can set the imagination alight. Imagine your favourite action film without the impact of room-shaking explosions, the calming feeling of birds chirping in a meadow, or a romantic scene without the rising swell of an orchestra.

It's easy to point the finger at gen z, but I think that the problem actually stems from brands not necessarily understanding that their target demographics do care about the quality of the content they are consuming. While some are perhaps taking the easy route and leaning into subtitles, a lot of content cleverly uses lip-syncing and music to great effect. The ‘90s cult band Pavement recently had one of its lesser-known b-sides become its biggest streaming hit off the back of being rediscovered for an online dance trend, so gen z is pretty resourceful if you ask me.

Brands that ignore the power of sound are unwise – they’re missing out on leveraging the emotional impact and connection they can have with their target market.

Rob Ballingall

Sound designer and composer at Sonic Union

It’s incredibly difficult to remove myself from this equation because, as a sound designer and audiophile, I can’t imagine consuming content without sound. Watching something with the sound off means experiencing only half of the creative. However, I don’t believe gen z is to blame for the mute phenomenon – though they may perpetuate it.

In my opinion, the real culprit is the overwhelming flood of content designed for a never-ending scroll. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are engineered for quick consumption and near-subliminal engagement. They offer endless fragmented visuals, compelling users to hop from one piece of content to the next. This format has fostered a ‘grass is always greener’ attitude, where the next video is just a swipe away, and attention spans have nose-dived. Simply put, muted content is passive, while sound invites engagement, builds trust, adds personality, and makes an experience more memorable. Good content with substance, craft, and depth always stands out – particularly if it can engage with audiences fast enough.

Professionals in content creation and advertising fields are, I believe, already well aware of the emotional and immersive power of top-notch sound design and music; the problem is creating content that’s exciting and engaging enough within a one or two-second opportunity to hook the audience. I encourage creatives to consider this from conception and to educate the brands they are collaborating with on why sound is absolutely necessary. I also encourage creatives to look at audio-forward content, where the main objective is to get the audience to listen. I’ve done several projects with that as the sole purpose recently, including a Mercedes-AMG experience where the screen was totally black. Instead, the story was told entirely through sound. Another good example of this was the 2024 Sundance Film Festival ident I created. I built a soundscape without visual cues, which was reinforced with animation. There’s always a balance to be found.

Brands suffer an incredible impact from mute-by-default content, which is that visuals alone can rarely define the correct emotional tone for every viewer. Trust sells, so with a lack of emotional tone-setting, brands might see lower retention rates, a lack of loyalty, revenue streams they struggle to tap, specific demographics outside of their reach, and lower levels of upselling. Acknowledging generational finance shifts is important for brands to know their qualified customers. If brands want to build a relationship with today’s socially-conscious and more tactile audiences, they need to understand the need for sound to serve as a bridge to deeper connection.

For future generations, sound can be the spark that elevates a piece of content from the doom scroll. Sound can pull audiences out of their habits and into something more intentional. If we want to counter this trend of muted consumption, we need to think about designing for both audio and visual immersion. Create experiences where the sound is the catalyst for full engagement. Sound designers are in a prime position to guide this evolution by helping brands and creators craft experiences that are both visually and sonically enduring.

Gus Koven

Lead sound designer at Barking Owl

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that people mute and use subtitles – it depends to a certain degree on what they’re watching.

If something is visually compelling, and not wall-to-wall dialogue, then people will be more inclined to watch it with the sound on. And then it’s a matter of, ‘does the sound just convey the same information you’re seeing, or is it doing something interesting – telling a different dimension of the story?’.

Brian Bernard

Audio director and sound engineer at Grayson Music

Clicking ‘sound off’ isn’t an exclusively gen z trend – it is widespread with all content consumers.

Attention is valuable. And there is a key difference between grabbing attention and engaging your audience. Sound is a powerful tool to grab the audience’s attention. But to truly engage, you have to be sure that once you earn someone’s attention, you’ve made it worth their while to keep the sound on.

Those first few seconds are key. Many brands push to start at a 10-second to grab that attention, but this can drive viewers to quickly click ‘sound off’ because they are simply exhausted from being bombarded by this approach. Their environment, social setting, other stimuli, and the consideration of others are also key factors. It’s important to meet members of your audience where they’re at. Where are they watching and listening? How are you going to not only grab, but engage?

In my experience, the most intriguing spots build, don’t give everything away straight out of the gate, and acknowledge the power of dynamics, pause, or even silence. Just as silence has power, every sound has a hidden emotional quality, like the sounds of thunder and rain – a visceral, tactile effect. Crafting a campaign from an audio perspective can mean if and when someone chooses to engage, they connect with what they hear. If brands think of their audience in terms of the emotional response, sound design is essential to drive the emotion in the same way music and voice can. For instance, is it warm, sharp, sleek, dynamic, etc.? If your campaign can provide inspiration to your audience, then you’re on to a win.

A perfect example of a project we worked on where sound design was the emotional driver, is ‘Bacon Is Rain’ for Greenfield Natural Meat Co., with our friends at No Fixed Address. What’s magic about this campaign is that it asks you to listen – engaging with the audience by appealing to its curiosity – literally asking, ‘hey, look at this cool thing that happens in your favourite TV/movie/commercial!’. On our end, it was a ridiculous amount of fun. We recorded frying bacon and explored different temperatures and mic positions to create different effects of rain (rainforest, heavy rain, tin roof rain etc.). A library of rain sound effects was then released on Soundcloud. Curiosity is where magic happens!

Tom Joyce

Creative director and sound director at Sound Canvas

Our world is full of noise, whether it be visual, audio, political or social media. With all this noise, brands and artists need to stand out to be heard. This doesn’t mean turning everything up to 11. Rather, it means being more creative and finding ways to engage and give your audience an experience.

More and more people are using decent headphones for working at home or coworking spaces, so brands can use technology to engage and be heard how it should be. Sound in 8D or DOLBY ATMOS gives more depth and a great sense of three-dimensional space. These are great ways to give a new experiential soundscape to their audience.

Paul Sumpter

Founder and creative director at The Futz Butler

A third of all sensory information we take in is auditory. We don’t experience the world through what we see alone, and gone are the days where our ears are only there to direct where to look. The way we interact with technology is becoming increasingly sound-centric, which inevitably means using sound – often voice – as a primary method. There is a definite shift away from staring at screens and typing, towards a more natural form of interaction, speaking and listening. Voice search exemplifies the trend of interacting with tech and brands in a more human, immersive way. E-commerce purchases via voice assistants are expected to rise by 400%, and 60% of UK homes now have smart speakers. Virtual retail and web3 will further this trend, making sound pivotal in early adoption and exploration.

Overall, from a brand perspective, the importance of sound is gaining momentum, with a 21% increase in companies investing in dedicated audio strategies since 2021. Nonetheless, there’s definitely a time and a place for things to be noticeably absent of sound. Campaigns for Cadbury’s, and more recently the Hellmann’s ‘When Harry Met Sally’ remake by Caviar are strong examples of where adding sound design (or music) would make the spots feel less authentic. A swing towards UGC and an almost punk aesthetic that’s in contrast to the hyperrealism of a lot of cinematic type approaches often lands well with gen z. It’s good as sound designers to have these different approaches and tools in your arsenal.

That being said, interestingly, there is some really strong evidence to suggest that ‘sound-on’ campaigns, from a brand perspective, perform far better than those without. We’ve been partnering with Meta recently, collaborating with brands to deliver highly-bespoke content for Instagram specifically, and its research suggests content with sound performs significantly better when sound is at the core of the content, both in terms of what is actively consumed, and people’s positive responses to it. Brands that use music aligned with their wider identity are 96% more likely to be remembered compared to those that use ‘unfit’ music or no music at all.

Here at The Futz Butler, we very much advocate that an element in a production (such as sound design) needs to be there for a reason – certainly not just because that’s what is always done. If it doesn’t add to the story or deepen the brand message, then you’ll regularly see us talking ourselves out of a gig, as it doesn’t bring anything to the party. It might just be restating – in an overly heavy-handed way – what is already coming over loud and clear to an audience via the cinematography, casting, or lighting for example. Most audiences don’t need to be spoon-fed an idea or emotion to anywhere near the degree a lot of people think. Less is usually more; let things breathe. We often have this exact conversation with brands with regard to the end pack shot or end sting.

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