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Sonos on alansa johtava amerikkalainen ääniteknologiayritys, joka tunnetaan parhaiten uraauurtavista langattomista monihuoneäänijärjestelmistä. Niiden ansiosta kuuntelijoiden on helppo suoratoistaa musiikkia ja muuta sisältöä koko kodissaan. Yritys jatkaa innovointia ja luo langattomia kaiuttimia, kotiteatterijärjestelmiä, kuulokkeita, arkkitehtonisia komponentteja ja integroitavia kodin äänentoistojärjestelmiä, jotka mullistavat tapoja, joilla ihmiset kuuntelevat ja yhdistävät ääntä.

Global Head of Editorial

Sonos is re-releasing the Sonos One SL: Union LA Edition in partnership with Color Of Change and in support of the Black Business Green Book. Created in collaboration with streetwear brand Union LA, the speaker features designer Sheila Bridges’ iconic Harlem Toile pattern. In this blog post, written in 2019, learn more about how the original collaboration came to fruition and how you can support the Black Business Green Book campaign.

Sheila Bridges had been a designer for more than 15 years when she discovered something surprising about French toile, a traditional pattern from the late 1700s. While designing the interiors of her new home, she wanted to incorporate the timeless pattern into her space. “I’ve always loved toiles. The issue was that there was no toile that spoke to me culturally,” she said. “I looked at hundreds of them but couldn’t find one that had people of color.” So she set out to design her own—a decision that would eventually land her work in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

In the decade since she created Harlem Toile as wallpaper for her home, the pattern has come to grace fabric, glassware, bedding, clothing, umbrellas, and now, in collaboration with streetwear clothing brand Union LA, a limited edition Sonos One SL. “As a designer, I think of myself as a visual storyteller, and that’s what toile does. It tells a story,” she said. “For my toile, it tells a story about African Americans and stereotypes. At the same time, it’s also celebratory. It is a celebration of African American culture.”

Before he became an owner of Union LA, Chris Gibbs worked the floor at one of the brand’s first stores in New York City. Chris and the rest of the team were encouraged to express themselves authentically while on the clock, which extended to choosing what music to play in the store. That freedom contributed to the confidence that would propel him to become the co-owner of Union LA along with his wife, Beth Birkett. “I wanted Union LA to become a social hub—a place where people could feel comfortable and experience new ideas, art, and music,” Gibbs said.

“As a designer, I think of myself as a visual storyteller…For my toile, it tells a story about African Americans and stereotypes.”

On a visit to The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, he came face to face with Harlem Toile. “When I first saw it, I was blown away,” he said. “I was very familiar with what toile was. And being someone of color, it had never spoken to me through my culture. I thought Sheila’s version was an incredible juxtaposition.” He immediately reached out to Bridges to see if they could include Harlem Toile wallpaper in a new Union store opening in Tokyo. From there, they worked together on a line of clothing featuring the pattern. And then Sonos reached out to Gibbs to explore a collaboration on a limited edition speaker.

A distinct point of view. A strong visual aesthetic. And music as an integral part of the work. These are some of the things that Joe Dawson, Sonos’s Global Director, Content and Brand Platforms, looks for when deciding which artists to collaborate with on limited edition speakers. “Union LA is a driver of culture and personal style,” Dawson said. “And as a long-time Sonos user, Chris understands the product and how to take full advantage of a storytelling platform like this.”

“Everything I do at Union LA starts with something very personal, and music is very personal to me."

Raised in Ottawa, Canada, his musical tastes were shaped by his parents’ diverse backgrounds. “I have a very eclectic and diverse taste in music that is very organic,” he said. “And my dad was a stereophile. So when I was first introduced to Sonos, what really got me into it was the high fidelity.”

It didn’t take much convincing to get Bridges on board for the project. When Chris first reached out to Sheila about featuring Harlem Toile on the limited edition One SL, she was in the process of installing Sonos in her new home. “I pick and choose these passion projects—things that I think are interesting or exciting to bring into the marketplace,” she said. “Because Sonos was a brand that I was really familiar with and something that I live with in my own home, I thought okay, this makes sense. Plus, music is a huge part of my life. I’m a closeted DJ.”

Bridges’ own musical tastes—heavily influenced by her father and experience growing up in Philadelphia—were expanded by some of her clients who worked in the music industry. “I was with music people all the time in my professional life,” she said. “And the only time that they could meet was usually at night. That meant going to some party or event or musical venue in order to have a meeting and pick their brains about their home. So, in that way, it increased my musical repertoire of things I was exposed to.”

Adding Harlem Toile to the Sonos One SL was not without its challenges. “The original pattern is quite detailed, and the one we were using was multicolored with a lot of fine lines. We were losing a lot of detail” Gibbs said, referring to the process of cutting hundreds of tiny holes into the pattern in order to allow sound to pass through from the speaker. To address this issue, the team pivoted to a mono color scheme, drawing inspiration from Delftware “Sometimes when you have these problems, the solutions wind up making something more unique,” he said.

In the decade since Bridges designed the pattern, she believes it’s become more relevant than ever. “The world is starting to acknowledge culture in a different way. And I think it makes people happy to see themselves reflected,” she said. When I first did it, a lot of people didn’t understand. I think we now have a better understanding of why it’s important.”

The reissued Sonos One SL: Union LA Edition is available for purchase in limited quantities directly from 

. To learn more about how to support Black-owned businesses, visit Color Of Change’s 

Celebrating Black Businesses With Reissue of Limited Edition Sonos One SL

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

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 an integrated 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 while 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 harmonize 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 harmonize 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 color, 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 watercolor 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 color 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 color 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 prioritizes sound and the empowerment of listeners, while backing away from music-inspired metaphors and cliches.

“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 color. Rather than hinge the brand to a single, everlasting brand color, the team decided to create a new seasonal palette of colors 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 color,” 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. As soon as you etch something in stone, it instantly feels dated. The world just moves too fast.”

The first iteration of this seasonal palette—consisting of colors 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 colors 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 plantlife, the palette is really inspired by the environment here.”

The color selection process wasn’t driven solely by hometown pride, of course. “We did our research and were influenced by current trends to ensure the colors 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 colors utilized 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 colorful, 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 color gets used, Sonos formed what it calls the Color 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 color in various places, discussing any potential conflicts or inconsistencies, and ultimately deciding what the next color 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 mediums 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 mediums 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 color 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 design of the Sonos wordmark, which was last revised by Bruce Mau in 2015. The logo, which happens to be an ambigram—meaning it’s readable when displayed horizontally, vertically, upside down, or backwards—will stay the same, but guided by new rules about its orientation.

Under the brand’s new design rules, the Sonos logo (which can now include color) may be oriented vertically, in addition to its traditional horizontal orientation.

This flexibility opens up more layout options for designers working with the brand, who will be free to place the Sonos logo onto a given canvas in either orientation and let other elements fall into place accordingly.

“We’re really embracing the modular and flexible qualities of our wordmark,” says Jeanguenat. “That’s influenced by the freedom and versatility of our system of products.”

It won’t be the first time customers have seen the wordmark in this vertical orientation; 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 vertical 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.

“We know that as a company, our vision of Sonos is so much bigger than what it is today,” says Leon. “The design of our brand needs to be scalable to reflect that. This refresh is really about future-proofing our look and voice for what’s ahead.”

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—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 chatter with loved ones—Not even a movie or your nightly TV binge. If that sounds cringeworthy, the reasons may run deeper than you realize. 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 percent of participants said listening to music helps reduce stress. Another 42% said that podcasts had a relaxing effect. Of course, the genre makes a difference. More than half (55%) of comedy podcast listeners said that those more humor-oriented shows helped relax them.

In the survey, majorities of listeners said they’re happier when listening to a favorite 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 one’s favorite 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 uptempo playlist. According to the Brilliant Sound Survey, 68% of respondents say that music helps motivate them to workout 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 workout 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. Mullenfiesen: 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 to 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 quality can boost the impact of listening on fitness performance, according to one recent experiment conducted in the United States by Sonos and its research partners. The three-day experiment measured the physical and mental responses people had while working out in a high-intensity interval training in three scenarios: Listening on low-quality wireless speakers, listening on a pair of Sonos Ones, and working out in silence. When exposed to high-quality sound, participants reported a 26% increase in positive feelings about their workout and 34% increase in feelings of connection with their workout partners (despite a 3.5% increase in average heart rate and 2% rise in energy exerted). In other words, great sound enabled people to work out harder without feeling like they were doing extra work.

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 realize the 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 of 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-fueling 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 (Rhianna, 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.

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