Every wonder why so many fast food logos are yellow, orange, and red?

According to color psychology, yellow and orange are associated with hunger, and red is associated with passion. When you’re driving down the road and see that big yellow M pop out at you on the billboard, the McDonald’s marketing team is hoping that was enough to push you over the edge, sending you to the nearest drive-thru so you can devotionally scarf down a double cheeseburger like a glutenous Vincent Van Gogh.

Simple tactic, but speaking from experience….. it works.

However, can music do the same thing?

Famed film scorer Hanz Zimmer says that music tells you how to feel, and has spent his life extracting emotion from his viewers whether Batman is saving Gotham City or Simba is looking out over his kingdom.

Here at Spacist Productions we also believe that music can play a big part in informing the emotions of a potential customer.

So then.. what’s our sonic branding equivalent of red, yellow and orange?

Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk posits that the first sounds that we hear are the low beat of our mothers heart and the high melodious sounds of our mother’s voice while we are in the womb for those first 9 months, and that for the remainder of our lives, we seek out tones that are close to these.

Millions of people at raves listening to a nonstop kick drum and huge sweeping synths would probably agree with him.

From an audio engineering standpoint, the heart beat frequency range is around 20-120 Hz and a mother’s voice frequency range is around 165-250 Hz.
So any sounds in this frequency range would automatically be comforting and get a listener’s attention, but that’s only a starting point.

In music theory we also use Modes to convey feeling to the listener. Modes were invented by the Ancient Greeks to denote different geographic or ethnic regions in Greece at the time. Over the years musicians have co-opted these modes for the feeling that they bring.

For instance the Ionian mode, or more recently called the major scale, sounds happy. The Dorian mode, or minor scale, sounds sad.

The Locrian mode….. well …. uh …….. sounds like Bjork.

Picking a mode when composing music is again, a great starting point for getting an emotion conveyed, but it goes even deeper than that.

Composers also use a concept called timbre to create music. Timbre is the perceived sound quality or “color” of a sound. Musical instruments like a piano or ukulele have a “bright” timbre so could be used to bring out happy or excitable emotions. Musical instruments like a bassoon or flugal horn have a “dark” timbre so could be used to bring out more somber or menacing emotions.

So if I wanted to compose a song that brought out the hunger and excitement of a McDonald’s logo, maybe I would compose a song in the Ionian scale on Ukulele at a frequency of around 200 Hz.

However, at the end of the day, the music also has to be catchy and stand on it’s own regardless of the physcological tricks.

Neuroscientists have discovered that your entire brain is activated when listening to music, and with attention spans at a premium in this ever-scrolling world, a well composed piece of music at the right frequency with the right sounds can be crucial for grabbing a customer’s attention and conveying the feeling of your brand.

At Spacist Productions we love the feeling that music brings, and we want to help you create the best possible feeling for your customers.

Click here to get in touch.