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Sonos is a leading American audio technology company that is best known for pioneering wireless multi-room audio systems, which make it easy for listeners to stream music and other content throughout their homes. The company continues to innovate, creating wireless speakers, home theatre systems, headphones, architectural components, and integrated home audio solutions that revolutionise how people listen and connect to sound.

While sound is integral to everything we do at Sonos, there has never been a specific sound associated with our brand. Until today. Coinciding with the launch of Sonos Radio, we are thrilled to reveal our new sonic branding. Composed by Philip Glass, iconic master of contemporary classical music, listeners can hear his original composition when tuning in to Sonos Radio. Here’s the story behind the sound.

In the months leading up to the launch of 

, Dmitri Siegel, Sonos VP of Global Brand, discovered that a major piece of the listening experience was missing. “We realized that Sonos didn’t really have a sonic brand identity,” said Siegel. “We’re obsessed with sound—it’s what we think about all day—and yet we didn’t have a sound that meant Sonos. When we made a dream list of who might compose that sound for us, Philip Glass was always at the top.”

Glass’s decades-long exploration of repetition and modularity made him a natural choice to build upon the Sonos name and visual identity, which are rooted in symmetry and simplicity. Luckily, he was known to have Sonos in his home and even 

, thanks to a long-standing relationship with 

Sonos’s Global Head of Music, Brian Beck

. Siegel added, “Philip Glass is the perfect fit for Sonos because of the combination of formal structure and exuberance, humanity and technical rigor in his music.”

Once Glass agreed to the project, Siegel’s brief to him was simple:

Sonos is a made-up word that means sound.

Now we need to make up a sound that means Sonos.

And, as one of the most influential American composers of the last century, he delivered. Describing the result, Glass noted, “The composition reflects two opposing ends of a spectrum: the organic and the electronic. The organic, represented by the acoustic instrumentation, speaks to the act of listening as both communal and personal. The electronic, which can be heard in the synthesized elements, is a nod to Sonos products as breakthrough technology, both in sound reproduction and connectivity.”

To learn about the sound profile of Sonos speakers, Glass worked with Giles Martin, award-winning composer, producer, and Sound Experience Leader at Sonos. “We wanted to be sure that the tone and range of the composition demonstrated the capabilities of the speakers and that the composition addressed those moments in the user experience where sound is used explicitly,” said Martin.

To bring the composition to life, it was recorded with 21 musicians at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City. The recording includes a 17-piece string section, flute, trumpet, French horn, piano, and electronic synths.

Once recorded, Martin mixed and mastered the sonic branding in collaboration with Grammy- and Emmy-winning recording engineer Sam Okell. When they were finished, Siegel finally had the sound that means Sonos.

In all, Glass created a complete set of branding elements, ranging in length and purpose, which will serve as a “sonic toolkit” for the Sonos sound experience. Martin and the Sound Experience Team will draw from this toolkit as they chart and define the brand’s sonic identity going forward.

We’re now proud to share the final product, brought to life in the animation below. It’s best experienced on your Sonos system because, as Glass notes, it was composed “using the full frequency spectrum in order to demonstrate the range and depth of Sonos speakers.”

 where you can hear the new sonic branding in brilliant sound, along with curated genre stations, original programming, and thousands of radio stations from around the world.

What Sound Means “Sonos”? Philip Glass Had the Answer.

Global Head of Editorial

As Sonos’s Global Head of Music, Brian Beck meticulously unearths the ideal song or artist for our ads, events, curated playlists, and more. Find out how Brian stays plugged in to the latest music—as well as his three tips for creating great playlists.

If you grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska in the early 80s, you had to work a little harder to discover new music. And a lot harder to deliver newspapers in subzero weather at five in the morning. For Brian Beck, this extra effort fortified him for a career in music that’s spanned radio, streaming, labels, artist management, and, eventually, his current role as Global Head of Music for Sonos.

It was on those dark, frigid mornings that Brian experienced the beginnings of his lifelong obsession with music. “My mom had to drive me to deliver the paper because it was pitch black and negative forty degrees—way too cold to ride my bike,” Brian said. “We would have cassettes playing in the car of either the Beatles, Motown, or Zeppelin. That was our Sunday morning ritual.” Aside from those cassettes, Brian’s music exposure was limited to local pop radio and what he could find at Musicland, the lone music store in the mall.

That is, until August 1981. “When MTV came, that’s when things really opened up,” he said. “In Alaska, TV plays a huge part of your life. I was totally an MTV baby.” Eventually, he would go on to work at MTV, but not before earning his stripes in radio.

Idealistic beginnings (or, how to score free CDs)

“Working in music was kind of an accident,” Brian said. As a high school student in Seattle, he had to choose a job to explore for career day. “My band had played a city-wide talent show earlier that year and afterwards, a radio station sponsor had given us a ton of free CDs. So when it came time to decide what to do for career day, I said I wanted to be a DJ because I figured I could get more free CDs.” His choice to spend the day at Seattle’s KNDD 107.7 The End turned into an internship and then a full-time job as a music programmer and on-air talent. “So yeah,” he recalls, “it all started because I wanted free music on career day.”

When Brian landed at MTV, he was responsible for creating multi-genre playlists for the network’s foray into music streaming. “That’s when I really learned the importance of investing time into creating playlists,” he said. Not content to just throw songs together because they loosely fit a theme, Brian applied the thoughtfulness he’d learned while programming for radio to creating playlists optimized for the streaming experience.

The friction between art and commerce pervades the music business. As an artist manager, Brian learned the nuances of balancing both, while—most importantly—staying true to the artist’s unique brand. Working with the teams of My Morning Jacket, The Head and the Heart, and Preservation Hall Jazz Band (amongst others), Brian supervised marketing, online strategies, merchandise, and more. And, unbeknownst to him at the time, he was gaining the experience he most needed for his role at Sonos.

Throughout Brian’s career, he has had a front-row seat to the evolution of music consumption—from cassettes and CDs to MP3s and streaming. And with that progress, he witnessed the balance shift from quality to convenience. “I always cared about great sound, but it was inconvenient,” he said. It wasn’t until he got his first Sonos speaker, a first generation Play:5, that he finally found a convenient way to enjoy brilliant sound. “I remember thinking, Holy shit, it’s just so easy,” he said. With a renewed appreciation for brilliant sound and an extensive background in the music business, Brian joined Sonos in late 2015 as US Head of Artist Relations.

Keeping an ear to the ground(-breaking artists)

In Brian’s current role, he’s responsible for finding and securing the right artist or song for everything music-related at Sonos. To do this, he cultivates deep relationships with the teams of artists who truly align with Sonos’s values and aesthetic—artists like Solange, Beastie Boys, Frank Ocean, and Karen O, to name a few. “My job is to introduce Sonos to great artists with the hope that they have a meaningful experience with the product,” Brian said. “So when the time comes to choose music to help us tell a story, the conversation with the team is a lot easier because the artist already uses Sonos and loves it.”

Over the past four years, those relationships have continued to flourish, providing a consistent soundtrack to high-profile product launches, brand activations, product partnerships, and events. While his work may sound like a mostly solo endeavor, the crucial element, Brian says, is being part of an incredible team. “This team is the best crew I have ever worked with and that makes this a dream job,” he said. “Everyone comes from different backgrounds and brings valuable, unique perspectives. It ensures that whatever we produce is our absolute best work.”

Choosing which artists to work with in the first place requires Brian to consistently keep himself aware of—and immersed in—the latest music. His method for doing so has changed quite a bit since his days roaming the aisles of Musicland in Alaska. “I’ve mainly consolidated it all to streaming,” he said. “I probably follow somewhere between 50 and 70 new music playlists across all music streaming services.” But that’s when the real work starts: “Each week, I’ll pull whatever sounds interesting or appears on multiple playlists into a ‘maybe’ playlist.” He rounds out that playlist with some help from social media, following several artists and labels on Instagram, and occasional visits to record stores for good measure. From there, he pares down the playlist several more times until he’s left with a final playlist. And that’s the playlist he turns to when asked what music should accompany a new initiative at Sonos.

When he’s not navigating the complexities of the music business, Brian is sometimes asked to lend his expertise to creating official Sonos playlists. His method for creating these playlists is exhaustive but rewarding. (We share one of our favorites below.) Here are his top three tips for creating your own playlists:

“While you may feel that you are well-versed in a specific genre, vibe, or category, it’s helpful to use the internet to dig deeper. Look into online forums—there are a lot of hardcore music nerds out there who can teach you something with the information they’ve posted. Explore other playlists—if I’m making a jazz playlist, there’s a good chance that The New Yorker has an essential jazz playlist that’s worth looking at as reference. Finally, check out artist playlists on streaming services—they know other artists and real music fans are looking at those and will judge, so you might find songs that aren’t obvious or familiar. Consider all your research as an opportunity to expand your music knowledge.”

“Flow is the most important. How you start your playlist sets the tone for the rest of it. So if it starts out really fast, then you’ll probably want to keep that type of high energy throughout the playlist. But if you approach it as a journey, or a DJ set, you can gradually build into it. Then, try to incorporate ups and downs, moments of familiarity and surprise. And when you add songs, always consider how they work with each other. If one song ends really hard and the next song starts really soft, you may want to start with the softer song.”

“Once your playlist is built, listen to it many times, from beginning to end. Then, don’t listen to it for a while. Let a week or so go by and then come back to it to see if it still holds up. Each time you listen, decide what to add or remove. Some songs aren’t meant for playlists. They might end on a sound that’s part of a transition to the next song. Or they might include an interlude like part of a voicemail. Those songs just don’t work well within the flow of a playlist. Pay attention to your levels as well. Some songs have really low volume. So if you’ve got a playlist that’s meant for a party and you go from a really loud song to a quiet song, it’s not going to flow well. Either place the song earlier in the playlist or remove it. You’re trying to create a vibe with the playlist, so be willing to let songs go in the name of your larger vision.”

Inspired? Share your playlists on social media and tag Sonos—we’d love to see what you come up with.

Soundtracking Sonos: Behind the Scenes with Our Head of Music

Photography by: Danny Clinch

Philip Glass opens his own door. He ushers me into the front room of his East Village brownstone — busy, unkempt and fully lived-in — to drop my coat off and wait a minute. I am, it seems, early, and Glass is still busy with his previous task. As I peel layers that protected me from a frosty New York afternoon, Glass shuffles into the next room over — the music room, it turns out — and gets back to quietly, intently banging out single notes on a piano. Let me tell you, there is no feeling like the feeling you get when you realize that you have accidentally interrupted Philip Glass — among the most influential American composers of the last century, one of the masters of contemporary classical music “with repetitive structures” (he shies away from the term “minimalist”), recipient of countless arts awards and lifetime-achievement medals — from working on music.

Philip Glass' shelf of sheet music and a Play:3.

Glass has lived in this house since 1984, and that crowded room — grand piano, synthesizer, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filling up much of its capacity, sheet music, art and Eastern artifacts on every surface — is where he does his composing. It is, in fact, the room where he wrote most of Symphony No. 11, which premiered at Carnegie Hall on January 31st, which also happened to be Glass’s 80th birthday, the overlapping hallmarks far from a coincidence.

“The whole thing was a set-up,” Glass says through a smirk that rarely disappears during our conversation, a couple of weeks after the event. “The people who work for me commissioned it to be done on my birthday which was going to take place at Carnegie Hall.” (He assumes a voice of faux-incredulity: “No pressure. ’Oh, I see, this is my party and I have to do the work?’”) Glass says he temporarily fretted the stressful circumstances — rewriting the symphony’s last 11 pages after the first rehearsal because “I realized that the ending was not definitive enough” — but estimates that the debut, performed by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, under the direction of its chief conductor (and longtime Glass collaborator), Dennis Russell Davies, went over pretty well. “The reception seemed fairly authentic. People really did like it. They weren’t just applauding because I was 80, like you might see with [older] people out running in the park, and people go ‘Yay’ only because they can still do it.”

“My days of listening were connected to my father’s record store, where I began working when I was 12. My first job in the music world was advising people what records they should buy, so I had to know all the records in the store.”

A moment later, referencing his own feelings in the symphony’s aftermath, Glass casually declares that “Writing it and hearing it is not exactly the same.” In a nutshell, this dichotomy is at the center of our discussion: how, for a composer, especially one as long-established as Glass, the acts of conceiving and listening are both intertwined and separate, and how such actions relate to one another when writing a massive piece such as the Eleventh.

For Glass, some notions of these concepts arrived early. Though he began attending Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody music school at the age of eight, he’s certain that “My days of listening were connected to my father’s record store, where I began working when I was 12. My first job in the music world was advising people what records they should buy, so I had to know all the records in the store. They would come in and say, ‘Well, I want to buy Beethoven’s Third Symphony’ and I would say, ‘Do you like it fast or do you like it slow? If you like it slow, you can get Bruno Walter’s. If you like it fast, we can get you Toscanini. If you want an American version, we got Leonard Bernstein’s.’ I had to listen professionally, you might say.”

Glass’s listening also needed to be mindful of the budding audiophile market. “We were aware of which were the good sounding records and which were not, but the people who were nuts about sound they didn’t care about the content. We’d say, ‘We just got a new marching-band record, you won’t believe how the brass sounds.’ We were selling music.”

As Glass moved through his schooling and creative evolution — at the University of Chicago and at New York’s Julliard School of Music; then in Paris, studying with the famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and 

notating the Indian music of Ravi Shankar

; then back to New York, where in 1967 he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble for the performance of his own budding compositions — he says, “I hardly listened at all.”

Glass’ fluency reading music and imagining it off the page accelerated his understanding of compositions and its forms. “I would pretend to be following lectures and actually I was reading a Beethoven quartet,” he says of racing the pedagogues and winning “because I could read faster.” Yet he also recognized the flaws in conceptualizing composed sound without actually listening back to it. “Are we hearing it accurately? Are we writing down what we want to hear?” Glass asks. In his mind, the greatest challenge of imagined accuracy is “hearing the music in real-time. It’s very hard to do. So you end up playing it on the piano,” which, if the piece is symphonic, is not the music’s true representation either. The relationship between linear time and writing is a life-long conundrum. “I think these are challenges for composers at any point in their life. You don’t get particularly better — you may learn certain tricks, but that’s it.”

Technology has certainly changed his landscape. It is interesting to hear Glass — who recently had a Sonos system set up throughout his house — discuss digital tools as “assets” in his process. Including, in the writing of the new symphony.

“I was working with Dennis,” he recounts of the lead-up to the Carnegie Hall premiere. “We were going over some transitions, and he had the rehearsals on a digital recorder. I had it put on Dropbox, pulled up the rehearsal on my phone, so we listened to it together, and would say, ‘well maybe we can cut a couple of measures here.’ Now in my music room, I tend to listen to playback of things, the rehearsal tapes. That became very useful.”

Aging has done its share to affect how Glass’ hears — “Perceptual faculties become degraded biologically,” he says, matter of factly. “Look I’m 80, what else is going to happen?” – but also, more importantly, what he chooses to hear.

“Mostly, I listen occupationally. Of course it’s fun to listen, but I don’t listen for fun. When I listen to Anoushka Shankar’s new album, for instance, I am more listening to see if she’s got a good band, if they’re playing together, would Ravi be happy when he heard it. Or, if I hear an orchestra, I want to hear the conductor, I want to hear how they sound.” The smirk rises to the fore once more. “I have all kinds of sinister agendas for listening tucked away.”

Glass says that, beyond music, he has other reasons to love his Sonos set-up. “I find that in my bedroom, I listen to the news — the stations are listed and they don’t drift. But listening for pleasure…” His voice trails away. “My ideal place is some place where they don’t play music. I found for example, that Chinese restaurants in New York don’t have music, have you noticed that?”

Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

What Sound Means “Sonos”? Philip Glass Had the Answer.

Soundtracking Sonos: Behind the Scenes with Our Head of Music

Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

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