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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.

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 fahrenheit—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 Music Land, the lone music store in the shopping centre.

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 secondary 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 whilst programming for radio to creating playlists optimised 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, whilst—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 anything music-related at Sonos. To do this, he cultivates deep relationships with the teams of artists that 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 use Sonos and love 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. Whilst 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 Music Land 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 finalist 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 create official Sonos playlists. His method for creating these playlists is exhaustive, but rewarding. (We share one of our favourites below.) Here are his top three tips for creating your own playlists:

“Whilst 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

Guest Writer

Meet Sonos Mechanical Engineer Camille Zaba, one of the engineers who helped design and test Sonos Move, and see the rigorous testing process her team put the speaker through to ensure its durability for life outside the lab.

Seeing a speaker soaked with water, heated in an oven, chilled in a freezer, zapped with a shock gun, and dropped from tables is enough to surprise almost anyone. But it’s an entirely different experience for someone who helped make Move a reality.

Meet Camille Zaba, the face and voice of the video series highlighting the rigorous testing Move endured and an integral member of the mechanical engineering team that worked on Move.

Before she found herself in the laboratories of Sonos, Zaba was a student caught between two of her greatest passions: music and taking things apart. Eventually she decided to pursue mechanical engineering. After years of working in telecommunications, she found a job at Sonos, where she could pursue both interests.

To most people, there’s a kind of mysticism surrounding mechanical engineering, perhaps a side effect of the name. But Zaba insists that this discipline is everywhere, from the packaging of everyday items to the materials that compose our appliances. And it’s not the profession of a singular genius’s mind; it takes many heads working together—and compromising.

“If the acoustics team could purely have its way, Move would probably be too big for the industrial design team,” Zaba explains. “If the mechanical engineering team could have its way, Move would probably look like a fortified, rugged box, which would be awesome in all of our testing, but the design team would be horrified. So you have all these teams collaborating and keeping each other in check.”

For Zaba’s team, there’s more to the work than methodical experimentation and meticulously recorded results in spreadsheets. Not every contingency is planned out. In fact, Zaba values her job in mechanical engineering precisely because it allows her to be creative, adapting to new findings and technical challenges that arise out of the development process. Case in point: her chief accomplishment of Move’s design, one that helps it excel in the drop test.

In the early days of the development, Zaba’s team had been testing the durability of existing Play:5 woofers through extensive drop testing and simulation to evaluate whether the traditional, separate steel woofer basket design would survive the requirements for Move. They discovered that the steel basket around the Play:5 woofer (the part of a speaker that produces the bass) warped during most drops due to the sheer weight of the internal magnet.

Following this discovery, the mechanical engineering team systematically redesigned Move’s woofer basket, integrating it into Move’s cabinet as a single piece. (Traditionally the basket is a separate component.)

After running through dozens of 3D models and just as many proposals, prints, and prototypes, they created a woofer basket with wide ribs and 40 percent glass composition that could withstand an impressive increase in force.

“No matter how much force we applied, we couldn’t break the new woofer basket.”

“We have the Instron, which is a machine that measures force-over-displacement,” Zaba adds. “Essentially, it assesses how much it takes to break something, and no matter how much force we applied, we couldn’t break the new woofer basket.”

The team later discovered that the original basket they had tested was an anomaly, featuring an entirely different material composition, but the newly-designed prototype for Move proved so durable that there was no question as to whether or not to include it in the final product.

“An engineer could look at this and be like, ‘Wow, that’s over-designed.’ But we knew that what we were doing was right,” explains Zaba. “I’ve never seen it break under any circumstances. Ever.”

Fast forward to the present, with Move ready for listeners to bring home and take anywhere. It’s not only as durable as Zaba and the team imagined, but also weather-resistant and impervious to dust, as put on display in the Check 1,2 video series. And on top of all these features, Move balances the demands of the acoustic team with an ultra-wide and richly-detailed soundscape, all whilst passing the criteria set by the industrial design team.

Creating a brilliant-sounding speaker is never as easy as it sounds—here, literally. Behind each high-definition 15-second snapshot is a world of design and testing, plus a dedicated team.

“We work together for months, tinkering with different parts and trying to harmonise across design, acoustics, software, and even packaging.”

“The five of us mechanical engineers worked with all the cross-functional teams to take Move from a filled-in shell to this incredible-sounding and durable speaker,” Zaba says, praising her collaborators. “Not only that, but we actually designed its parts. We needed an enclosure that didn’t exist. And so we made sure it did.”

For Zaba, helping engineer a speaker that endures life’s surprises as incredibly as it sounds was almost surreal. “Not everyone gets to combine their greatest passions,” she says, beaming with gratitude. “Creating Move was almost like writing a song. We work together for months, tinkering with different parts and trying to harmonise across design, acoustics, software, and even packaging. And when it all comes together, it’s music.”

The Making of Move: How We Made Our New Portable Speaker Ready for the Outdoors

With SYMFONISK WiFi speakers, Sonos and IKEA challenged themselves to find new ways of bringing sound into the home. Find out how the two brands worked together to design speakers that double as adaptable pieces of IKEA furniture.

At first thought, bringing the sound of a full orchestra into a dining room—without a speaker—doesn’t even seem like a challenge. It seems impossible.

Or so you might think. Meet SYMFONISK, a new collection of wireless speakers from Sonos and IKEA that double as a lamp or a multipurpose shelf—but with the premium sound you expect from Sonos. To create SYMFONISK WiFi speakers, the two companies worked together to introduce sound into the home in a more subtle way, integrating speakers into functional, beautiful pieces of furniture.

It may feel a little like magic. And in a way, it is. Except this magic wasn’t the kind from storybooks, but the kind that comes from teamwork, negotiation, prototyping, and repeated testing. And some knitting.

The first hurdle was figuring out how to best work together. Sonos brought to the table what it does best—creating great sound. IKEA, in turn, brought the expertise of home furnishing, as well as the spontaneity of trial-and-error design. Hilmar Lehnert, Audio Technology Manager at Sonos, describes both teams’ creation strategy as “an iterative process,” with new and unexpected directions arising the more they worked together and learned from each other. This process, Lehnert says, was made more complex by the number of collaborators involved. On one hand, there was IKEA, spearheading the products’ outward design, and on the other hand, there was Sonos, overseeing their sound and performance. Rounding out the team was the manufacturer responsible for bringing Sonos and IKEA designs into being.

“It was an intricate three-way dance. With three teams in the mix, we had to be aware of what each one was working on at any given time,” Lehnert says.

However familiar it was with creating great sound, Sonos still had a lot to learn about how to apply those methods to the less familiar field of home furnishing.

One example of this dance can be found in the brands’ working communication. Sonos discovered that it was difficult for the audio team to speak about sound with the industrial designers at IKEA, whose expertise applied to an entirely different field. In order to ensure the creation of the best product, Sonos’s industrial designers had to translate what their audio team needed in a way that made sense to their counterparts at IKEA.

“Lehnert had to explain how acoustics work. Then our industrial design team, which shares the same language and perspective as IKEA’s industrial design team, would say, ‘Here’s what that means for you’,” Sara Morris, Senior Product Manager at Sonos, says of the experience. She continues, “When Lehnert’s talking about bass response, this is how it affects the design. And when he’s talking about acoustic transparency, this is what it means for the material choices.”

However familiar it was with creating great sound, Sonos still had a lot to learn about how to apply those methods to the less familiar field of home furnishing. Lehnert describes his experience at a knitting manufacturer in Austria with both bemusement and awe.

“I’ve learnt more about knitting than I was ever planning to, but it was fascinating,” he says. “What types of threads you use, thread patterns, thread tensions, warp and weft. That all needs to be understood—what they can do and what they can’t do, what affects the sound.”

The team wound up going through hundreds of different fabrics, few of which would have been considered for a traditional speaker, to find the one that worked best as a cover for the speaker and design element of the table lamp with WiFi speaker.

When people think of making a house a home, they usually default to thoughts of the aesthetics. But sound can serve just as important of a role in defining the atmosphere of your home.

The result of this collaboration is a range of speakers that don’t read as speakers at all but as adaptable pieces of furniture for your home. On your nightstand, the table lamp can simultaneously provide light for bedtime reading and an ambient soundtrack for falling asleep. Likewise, there are seven different ways to incorporate the WiFi bookshelf speaker into your home—all of which will sound great due to Sonos’s Trueplay™ tuning technology. And, like all Sonos products, SYMFONISK WiFi speakers are designed to seamlessly integrate with the rest of your Sonos system.

When people think of making a house a home, they usually default to thoughts of the aesthetics. But sound can serve just as important of a role in defining the atmosphere of your home. With SYMFONISK WiFi speakers, you can enhance both, simultaneously.

“When people visit your home, they see your art. They relax on your furniture. And layered into this experience is the way your house sounds,” says Morris. “You can show them, audibly, ‘This is who I am.’”

Bright Ideas: How Sonos and IKEA Made Furniture with Brilliant Sound

The new Sonos brand identity puts a fresh spin on the look and feel of the brand, with a new approach to using colour, illustration, typography, and some new design tools built with the future in mind. Here’s the inside story.

There’s something almost unreal about the landscape in Santa Barbara. From the pristine sky that bleeds seamlessly into the ocean, to the watercolour mountain backdrops, there’s a surprising scenic diversity in this Southern California town—all of it peppered with palm trees and an eclectic floral arrangement. It’s the sort of scene most would expect to find on an inspirational poster or computer desktop wallpaper, rather than in their own backyards.

The unique shape and colour of the scenery is why people flock to Santa Barbara for vacation. It’s also one of the reasons that the founders of Sonos decided to set up shop there in 2002— opting to reimagine home audio against the backdrop of a sleepy paradise, rather than a bustling tech hub. Today, Sonos is a global brand with offices around the world, but Santa Barbara is the place that helped inspire the early inventions, designs, and decisions that made Sonos what it is today.

So when it came time for the Brand Design team at Sonos to refresh the visual look and feel of the brand this year, it was only fitting that they would look to that very same landscape for inspiration.

The new Sonos brand identity, which was crafted by the company’s internal creative team in collaboration with the agencies Anomaly (New York) and Instrument (Portland), consists of several revised design elements, such as the introduction of a seasonal colour palette, a new illustration style, and some changes to typography and the rules governing things like layout and the orientation of the company’s logo.

Sonos has also updated its brand voice, leaning into simpler, more enduring language that prioritises sound and the empowerment of listeners, whilst backing away from music-inspired metaphors and clichés.

“We approached this rebrand with a rigorous design process, system thinking, and most of all, a passion for the listener and their needs,” says Dmitri Siegel, VP of Brand at Sonos. “Through that process we stripped away the fluff and the metaphor and found the power in who we really are and what we do: the enduring beauty of our products, the magical simplicity of our software, and our signature commitment to quality and design.”

In early May, Sonos began rolling out this new brand identity and voice, starting with a new global brand campaign with ads in Times Square, Rolling Stone magazine and other prominent placements around the world–as well a design refresh of key digital touch points like the brand’s global 

“We had a unique opportunity to update our brand strategy, brand identity, and do a full website redesign at the same time,” says Siegel. “That almost never happens. The level of collaboration is a big part of what makes this ID so strong. We made sure it would work well on our website, which is our most complex brand experience.”

Perhaps the most noticeable change within the brand’s new look is the introduction of colour. Rather than hinge the brand to a single, everlasting brand colour, the team decided to create a new seasonal palette of colours designed to adapt and scale as the company and its line of products—which themselves are typically designed in black or white—evolve and expand.

“We organically rejected the notion of permanent brand colour,” says Michael Leon, Global Creative Director at Sonos. “It felt like a dated concept”. “Once we freed ourselves of that, we were able to open our minds to more timely influences.”

The first iteration of this seasonal palette—consisting of colours named Sky, Rose, Sand, Rust, and Pine—was inspired, quite naturally, by some of the local scenery outside the company’s Santa Barbara headquarters.

“These colours are definitely a nod to our surroundings,” says Julia Jeanguenat, Art Director on the Sonos Brand Design team. “From the landscape, to the ocean, to the plant life, the palette is really inspired by the environment here.”

The colour selection process wasn’t driven solely by hometown pride, of course. “We did our research and were influenced by current trends to ensure the colours we picked for this first seasonal palette felt very of-the-moment,” says Jeanguenat.

Just as Sonos has grown and expanded to other offices, territories, and product categories, the colours utilised by the brand will evolve over time as well. Maintaining that flexibility was key in ensuring that the brand and its products retain a fresh look, including ones that were released years ago.

Over the last few years, the image of a sleek-looking black or white smart speaker sitting heroically on a shiny, clean surface has become ubiquitous in consumer tech. Even much of the language used to market such devices has become redundant. For Sonos, the shift to more colourful, flexible branding lets the company and its products stand out, Jeanguenat explains.

“We knew we needed to cut through the sea of sameness that you get when you’re walking through a place like a big box retailer,” she says. “Everything begins to look similar.”

To help the company make decisions about how colour gets used, Sonos formed what it calls the Colour Committee—a small panel of internal stakeholders from across the brand, hardware, software, and experience teams. Each month, this cross-functional group gets together to explore and understand how the brand is using colour in various places, discussing any potential conflicts or inconsistencies, and ultimately deciding what the next colour palette will look like.

“We have the ability to change the tone of the brand based on the emotion the palette delivers,” explains Leon. “That’s our way to keep the brand relevant without having to rebrand every three years.”

Illustrating Sound Experience, Line for Line

Sonos prides itself on delivering an effortlessly easy listening experience through a mix of hardware and software—a system of products that all work effortlessly together. But just because something is simple to use doesn’t mean it’s always easy to explain, especially in 2D visual media like photography—and especially when the most important detail, sound, is invisible to the naked eye.

For designers trying to visually articulate the Sonos product experience, concepts like multi-room audio, voice control, Airplay 2—and much of the magic that happens between software and hardware to make the Sonos listening experience possible—is much easier to explain verbally (or better yet, through using the product itself) than it is with flat pictures. That’s where creative uses of illustration come into play.

Under its new brand identity, Sonos makes heavier and more deliberate use of hand-drawn elements, having partnered with illustrator James Graham to develop a new house illustration style. Armed with this new illustration toolkit, Graham and other designers creating work for the Sonos brand can communicate some of the detail and nuance of the Sonos product experience in a succinct, digestible way without relying as much on written copy or other media like animation and video.

“Illustration helps us show what Sonos is, in a way,” Leon says. “We’re not trying to decorate the brand with illustration, you know what I mean? It’s really a tool, a utilitarian thing.”

Illustration can also help paint a more holistic picture of the Sonos experience when paired with other types of imagery. For instance, designers can more easily draw the connection between the hardware and software elements of the experience, thanks to a new, simple method of illustrating the Sonos app interface, which can be paired with other imagery, such as photography that depicts real-life listening scenarios.

“Adding illustration to showcase the app was a breakthrough in sharing the total experience of listening on Sonos,” says Leon. “Speakers are only one part of it, but up till now we’ve been attempting to share the experience with only images of hardware. The software is integral.”

Flipping the Logo and Building a Flexible Brand

Alongside the addition of a new colour palette and illustration style, Sonos is also making some changes to the way words show up in brand creative—most notably, through a new typeface. After years of using Helvetica Neue as its primary font, the brand is transitioning to a new one called Aktiv Grotesk. It’s a fairly subtle shift from one sans-serif typeface to another, rather than a radical departure.

“It’s a little bit more interesting,” says Jeanguenat of the new typeface. “It has unique qualities to it that feel more contemporary and ownable for us.”

One thing that isn’t changing is the look of the Sonos wordmark, which was last revised by Bruce Mau in 2015. The logo, which happens to be an ambigram—meaning it reads the same when flipped upside down or backwards—will stay the same, but with new rules about its orientation.

This freedom to flip the logo sideways allows designers to fit the wordmark onto any canvas with more flexibility.

This won’t be the first time customers have seen the wordmark flipped sideways; products like the Play:5 and Playbase have displayed the logo that way for some time. It’s just one of the ways that the brand’s new visual identity plays creative homage to the Sonos products themselves—not just by mimicking details like the sideways logo, but by creating a design system that strives to be flexible, modular, and easy to scale.

That creative scalability is expected to come in handy over the next few years, especially when it comes to expanding the company’s system of products–and designing new creative to help support those expansions. In the meantime, the brand has a whole new set of creative tools to play with.

Fresh Look, Same Brilliant Sound: Inside the New Sonos Brand Identity

Listening is the world’s most versatile drug. Administered in the right quantities—and at the right quality—music, podcasts, and other forms of culture can supercharge our mood, productivity, fitness routine, and personal relationships. And yes, even our sex lives. That’s not just marketing hype from a speaker company. It’s backed by data.

Imagine, if you dare, a week without listening. No music, no podcasts or audiobooks, no dinnertime conversation with loved ones—not even a film or your nightly TV binge. If that sounds cringeworthy, the reasons may run deeper than you realise. As a growing body of scientific research suggests, consuming culture with our ears is an essential element of the human experience—one that naturally enhances many aspects of our daily lives.

Put another way, listening is the world’s most versatile drug. Not only does it help us feel less stressed and more productive, but the sound of music, podcasts, and other types of culture can motivate us to exercise more, supercharge our sex lives, spark new ideas, and even strengthen our bonds with family and friends. This isn’t just hype of the sort you might expect from a sound experience brand. It’s backed by science.

“Scientists have found evidence that we are wired to perceive and enjoy music as well as to bond with each other through music,” says Daniel Müllensiefen, a professor of music psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. “This explains why music is a ubiquitous part of the human experience, supporting the theory that music has a special, important function in our lives.”

The Brilliant Sound Survey is a new round of research that helps bolster the case for better living through listening. In an online survey of 12,000 listeners in 12 countries around the world, Sonos and its research partners found that listening, particularly to music, is reported by participants to have a significant positive effect on four key areas of life: mood, fitness, relationships, and productivity.

“Music is unique in that it appeals to different psychological functions,” says Dr. Müllensiefen. “It can trigger exactly the same areas in the brain that food and sex and other recreational activities and drugs can trigger. It can also be physical in terms of participating, like dancing along or playing drums.”

If sound matters, so, too, does its fidelity. According to some research, the transformative effects of listening may well be amplified when the sound quality is higher.

“It’s perfectly plausible that sound quality makes a difference, because it’s often small and subtle cues that trigger emotions, like the breath of the singer or the squeak of the guitar strings,” explains Dr. Müllensiefen. “If the sound is blurred or muffled, then it doesn’t have the same effect.”

Of Sound Mind: Listen Better to Feel Better

It hardly comes as a shock that listening has an impact on our moods. But the Brilliant Sound Survey results illustrate just how deep and multifaceted that connection between music and mood is perceived to be by listeners. Seventy-four per cent of participants said listening to music helps them reduce stress. Another 42% said that podcasts had a relaxing effect. Of course, the genre matters. More than half (55%) of podcast comedy listeners said that such shows relaxed them.

In the survey, majorities of listeners said they’re happier when listening to a favourite song (52%) and that music helps boost their mood at work (58%). More on that below.

Well, sure—you might say—of course listening to their favourite music makes them feel happy. The connection between mood and music isn’t always predictable, however. In the survey, 36% of respondents said music has made them laugh unexpectedly. Even more (40%) said it’s made them cry unexpectedly.

“Many people probably aren’t aware of how much they rely on music to regulate their moods throughout the day,” says Dr. Müllensiefen. “We take it for granted because music is so much more available than it used to be. You can virtually listen to anything at any point in time these days.”

Once again, the quality of the sound appears to make a difference. A large majority (82%) of listeners said that a great sound system can make a party more fun.

Fitness Tune-up: The Power of Performance-Enhancing Sound

Does getting yourself to the gym turn into an epic internal struggle? Next time, try putting on an up-tempo playlist. According to the Brilliant Sound Survey, 68% of respondents say that music helps motivate them to work out when they’re tempted to skip it. The motivational role of sound and listening doesn’t stop when the workout gets going. Majorities of listeners say that music helps encourage them to work out longer (52%), push themselves further (55%) and exercise with greater intensity (51%).

When we’re exercising, music seems to play at least two distinct and important roles, according to Dr. Müllensiefen: Distraction and stimulation.

“It basically distracts you from how hard you’re working out and takes your mind off how many more miles you have to run,” he says. “But you focus on something else, which is really important.”

Music also helps to stimulate us while we’re working out. “High-paced, dynamic, loud music would cue your physiology that you need to be in an alert state, keep going, and to keep the adrenaline flowing,” he says. “And if strong emotions are expressed, this can also boost your physiological system because strong emotions signal that there’s something important going on.”

If music operates somewhat like a drug when it comes to physical fitness and motivation, it appears to be a potent one. Three quarters of listeners say that music has a bigger impact on their workout regimen than any supplement does.

Sound & Relationships: Listen, Live, Laugh, Love

Listening also has a major effect on our connections with other people, from friends and family to lovers and long-term partners. Indeed, scientific research over the years has shown that musical taste and ability can play a role in our sexual attraction to one another. That finding is backed up by the Brilliant Sound Survey, in which 70% of respondents said they find others more attractive when they have similar taste in music. Even more people (76%) said they feel an instant connection with others when they realise they have similar taste in music.

“We seem to be hardwired to music,” says Dr. Müllensiefen. “It’s part of our evolution as a species that music has played a part in social bonding, as a function of grooming within larger groups. It might have been useful for sexual mating as well, for example.”

The lust-fuelling characteristics of music don’t just dissolve once that initial connection is made. According to the survey, most people say that music makes sex much better (59%) and that it can even make them more adventurous in bed (56%). It may come as a surprise, given how sexually-charged our relationship with music can be, that only 20% of listeners said they have a dedicated playlist for having sex.

Listening doesn’t just tighten our bonds with others in the bedroom. As the 2016 Music Makes It Home study commissioned by Sonos and Apple Music helped demonstrate, it can have all kinds of effects on our interactions with the people in our lives. In this new survey, 64% of people said that music helps them feel connected with family, while 69% said it can ease tensions at home.

“Listening to music and singing together has been shown in several studies to directly impact neuro-chemicals in the brain, many of which play a role in pleasure, closeness, and connection,” says Dr. Müllensiefen.

Your Brain on Listening: Productivity and Creativity

The notion that listening to music can help us focus and be more productive isn’t exactly breaking news. But would you believe that music is more potent than coffee? Sixty-seven percent of listeners say exactly that, according to the Brilliant Sound Survey. And just as many say music helps spark new ideas when they’re feeling stuck.

When it comes to listening and work performance, the survey results offer some pretty glowing endorsements. More than half (52%) of listeners say they wouldn’t be successful at work if they didn’t listen to music. Aiming for a promotion? Curating a playlist of your favorite focus-friendly music isn’t a bad place to start; A staggering 76% of respondents to the survey said that listening to music helps them produce their best work.

“Generally, music can have a strong stimulating effect that makes us alert and focused,” says Mullensiefen. But as with any other mind-altering substance, the results may vary based on the person and their circumstances. “There are several studies in the scientific literature that show that the right kind of music can enhance the performance on the right kind of task for the right kind of people.”

The Science of Listening: How Brilliant Sound Makes for Better Living

Sonos uses a unique blend of science and art to ensure your favorite music, movies, and TV shows sound the way their creators intended.

When Giles Martin wanted to track down the film industry’s most credible sound experts, he did what most of us do when in need of professional assistance: he googled it.

Having practically grown up in recording studios, Martin already had his share of friends in the music world. As the Sound Experience Leader for Sonos, he routinely consults other record producers, mixing engineers and musicians to get their perspective on how accurately Sonos reproduces the music they create in the studio. Top tier music producers like Nigel Godrich (Radiohead), Manny Marroquin (Rihanna, John Mayer), Tom Elmhirst (Adele), and Noah Goldstein (Kanye West) have become more involved in this work, recently forming the core of what Sonos calls its Soundboard, a panel of industry sound creators who lend their time and ears to Sonos in an effort to inject the artist’s perspective into the product development process.

“The sound of music or the sound of a great movie should be transmitted into your home as pure and honest as it can be.”

“There isn’t such a thing as a ‘Sonos sound,’” Martin explains. “Like a clear window that lets the light shine through, Sonos is a portal to the world of sonic culture in your home.”

To keep this metaphorical window free of the dust that could disrupt that clarity, Martin works closely with the Soundboard and a wider network of sound creators to critique and fine-tune the sound experience of the Sonos system.

For years, this approach has worked well for music. Thanks to the combined roots of Martin (who produces and remixes the Beatles albums originally recorded by his late father, Sir George Martin) and Sonos (which pioneered wireless home listening over 15 years ago), it wasn’t hard to cover the bases when it came to the music experience on Sonos. But when Martin first learned about the company’s latest endeavor—

, a TV soundbar tasked with defying its compact size with room-filling sound for movies, shows, and music alike—he knew he would need to find some creative expertise from the world of cinema sound as well.

“The sound of music or the sound of a great movie should be transmitted into your home as pure and honest as it can be,” says Martin. “While developing Beam, we treated music and home theater equally.”

Martin’s inquiry led him to the name of Chris Jenkins, a film re-recording mixer whose Academy Award for his work on 

 is just the shiniest, newest golden statue in his collection of accolades. The name looked familiar to Martin because, as luck would have it, the two were already slated to work together on the sound for Ron Howard’s documentary project 

Eight Days A Week: The Beatles’ Touring Years

. Martin and Jenkins became fast friends and it didn’t take long for their conversations to steer toward home theater and the bumpy journey that sound often makes from the mixing board to the living room.

“We had built a great team that knew about music,” says Martin. “Chris Jenkins is an expert on movies. He’s worked on some of the greatest movies ever made, and he knows how they should sound.”

With Jenkins’ addition to the Soundboard, the sound experience team at Sonos was ready to take on the unique challenge of building Beam to fill a room with clear, immersive sound that does creative justice to chart-topping albums and Hollywood blockbusters alike.

“If you’re going to have a speaker under your television, it shouldn’t just be a home theater product,” says Martin. “The challenge is to make a speaker that’s great for home theater so dialogue is great, car chases wiz through your home, but also the music is great so the honesty of a track comes through.”

Academy Award-winning re-recording engineer Chris Jenkins (Mad Max: Fury Road) is one of the sound creators on the Sonos Soundboard, a panel of creative advisors that helps Sonos fine-tune the sound of speakers like Beam.

For Sonos, perfecting the sound experience of Beam would require a refined version of the process the company has used for the last few years: First, start with world class talent in engineering, acoustics, and design to build a speaker with clear, room-filling sound. Then pressure-test that hard work with the critical, creative input of the people who crafted the sound of the content in the first place; In short, blend the science with art.

Sonos has no shortage of left-brained expertise when it comes to sound. With five PhDs, an arsenal of patents, and a team with more than a century of combined experience building world-class speakers, the sound team is well equipped to achieve engineering feats like getting deeper bass out of small speakers, designing super-flat transducers like the ones found in Playbase, and developing spatially-aware tuning technology like Trueplay. Each new product is put through its paces in Sonos’s state-of-the-art acoustic measurement and testing facilities, including four large sound-tight anechoic chambers. Team members like Director of Audio Systems Engineering Hilmar Lehnert are frequently found on the conference speaking circuit, and Sonos engineers actively participate in the scientific community and have published work in academic journals.

“The central nervous system of a movie is dialogue.”

Grammy Award-winning music producer and Sonos Soundboard member Manny Marroquin.

In 2014, Martin was brought on as the Sound Experience Leader to help Sonos balance out the hard science with input from the artistic community. Starting with Playbar, Martin and his team began seeking the input of creators through informal, Sonos-hosted listening sessions in which the sound of each product can be tweaked in real time. Over the years, creators like Hans Zimmer, Rick Rubin, Nigel Godrich and dozens of others have sat down with Sonos engineers to hear how their work sounds on Sonos devices and share their honest feedback.

These sessions, which take place in listening rooms at Sonos headquarters or in the creators’ homes, give the artists (along with Sonos engineers) a chance to lean back, listen intently, and discuss what they hear in a casual, laid back environment. In one such listening session in 2015, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich reportedly tested out the Play:5 for more than seven hours. In most cases, these creators watch and 

listen to the music, movies, or TV shows that they’ve worked on

 in order to judge how accurately the Sonos system retains the original emotion and overall impact of the content’s carefully crafted sound. If it doesn’t sound quite right, they say so.

“When we sit down with these people we ask them for criticism,” says Martin. “Are they disappointed with what they hear from Sonos? How can we tweak the sound to make them happy?”

Soundboard member Manny Marroquin is one of several music industry sound professionals who participate in these listening sessions. For Marroquin, a Grammy-winning mixing engineer and music producer who has worked with Rihanna, Kanye West, Linkin Park, and John Mayer, these sessions are more about listening for emotion than getting overly technical about sound engineering.

“I just listen to how it makes me feel,” says Marroquin. “The moment I start to think about it, then I know something’s off. But if I get lost in that moment, then I know I’ve got my right brain engaged.”

This listening-and-tuning work has continued with Play:1, Play:5, Playbase, Sonos One, and, most recently, Sonos Beam.

The new Sonos Beam in one of the anechoic chambers in Sonos’s headquarters in Santa Barbara, California.

As a sound engineer working in Hollywood, Chris Jenkins knows all too well the limitations of the home theater listening experience. As televisions get thinner and thinner, the sound typically gets worse. Home theater speakers designed to fix that problem may amplify the sound effects and movie scores just fine, but they often overlook what Jenkins believes is the most crucial ingredient: the sound of the human voice.

“The most important part of movies is storytelling,” says Jenkins. “I’ve found that the experience of what the actors were saying—the performance and the storytelling part of it—is often really lacking. The central nervous system of a movie is dialogue.”

Sonos Beam tackles this dialogue clarity problem first through design and engineering. As a three-channel speaker, Beam keeps dialogue centralized in the center channel, so the detail of what people are saying on screen doesn’t get lost amidst the sounds emanating from the left and right channels. Beam also comes with a speech enhancement feature that further improves vocal clarity.

“When we sit down with these people we ask them for criticism. Are they disappointed with what they hear from Sonos? How can we tweak the sound to make them happy?”

Getting the dialogue performance of Beam just right is one of several things that was aided by input from sound creators like the team behind HBO’s Westworld, Baby Driver sound designer Julian Slater, and, of course, Jenkins himself.

“One of the things that we listened to was the opening of Mad Max: Fury Road, which has a lot of crazy loud cars and chases,” says Jenkins. “But the very opening of it is super subtle and very atmospheric, and there’s lots a little voices and lots of delays and reverbs. It’s what Max is hearing in his head before he sets off on his journey.”

This balancing act between explosive and subtle sounds is, in many ways, emblematic of the whole Beam creation story: music vs. film, dialogue vs. sound effects, design vs. acoustics, engineering vs. art. In order for Sonos Beam to fit into people’s lives and sound just right, the team working on it needed to thoughtfully echolocate the sweet spot between each of these competing factors.

“The fun thing for me about Sonos is working with teams that have different interests,” says Martin. “Design wants to make a speaker that looks great in the home. Audio wants to make a speaker that sounds great. It’s difficult to make that compromise of fit, form, and function. We all have to be happy by the end of it. It’s like recording and writing a song. You all have to be happy with the end result.”

How Sonos Works With Creators to Fine-Tune the Home Sound Experience

Academy Award-winning film sound engineer Chris Jenkins spends his days crafting sonic landscapes for movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Fifth Element. The studio headphones may come off by the time he gets home, but the listening is just getting started.

Despite its name, the motion picture would be nothing without the other half of its creative equation: Sound. Behind every booming explosion, whispered line of dialogue, and iconic score is a team of sound engineers helping to orchestrate the cinematic experience. Few do so as masterfully as Chris Jenkins.

As a film sound re-recording engineer, Jenkins uses his discerning ear to propel stories off of screens and immerse audiences in the worlds of such films as 

. In his nearly 40 years of experience, he’s amassed over 180 mixing credits and won three Academy Awards.

When he’s not helping to craft multi-sensory storytelling experiences for movie theaters, Jenkins is busy doing his part to make sure movies and music sound amazing at home as well. As a member of the Sonos Soundboard—an advisory panel of entertainment industry sound creators enlisted by Sonos–Jenkins works closely with the company’s engineers and product team, offering his professional feedback on the sound of speakers like the new Sonos Beam as they’re being developed. Through a series of hands-on listening sessions, creative advisors like Jenkins have a simple aim: To help Sonos ensure that the original emotion and sonic clarity of films, music, and other content are retained as this work makes its way from the studio mixing board to the living room.

Because he spends all day working with sound, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if he wanted to come home to complete silence, but Jenkins’s passion spans both his professional and personal lives. We visited him at his home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Jeanne, and two dogs, Daisy and Moose, to talk about sound and learn how he listens off the clock.

How do you transition from listening at work to listening at home? What role does sound play here as opposed to in the studio?

We always have music on here. If I work late in the studio, sometimes a quiet drive home is necessary just to help me reset, but that quiet time makes the listening experience here at home even better.

We live in this beautiful canyon. I love the sounds of nature and how still it can be sometimes, but great music is just a requirement for home. Otherwise, it feels naked in a way. I grew up in a house with music, so it’s always been a rich part of my life, including in my work on movies.

Living out here must be great for decompressing from work and finding inspiration.

I listen to the way things sound out here, and sound comes from everywhere. Nature is everywhere sonically. We have an incredible gift with our ears and our minds to be able to process that. So I keep listening to music and thinking about ways to improve that experience, whether it’s a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar or Luciano Pavarotti with an 80-piece orchestra. There should be no difference in the quality of listening.

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The Science of Listening: How Brilliant Sound Makes for Better Living

How Sonos Works With Creators to Fine-Tune the Home Sound Experience

Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

How to Listen to Vinyl With Sonos

Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

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Soundtracking Sonos: Behind the Scenes with Our Head of Music

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.css-4c3m2r{color:#ffffff;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Bright Ideas: How Sonos and IKEA Made Furniture with Brilliant Sound

The Science of Listening: How Brilliant Sound Makes for Better Living

How Sonos Works With Creators to Fine-Tune the Home Sound Experience

Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

How to Listen to Vinyl With Sonos

Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

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Bright Ideas: How Sonos and IKEA Made Furniture with Brilliant Sound