Welcome to the Sound In Marketing podcast. My very special guest today is Steve Keller from Pandora's Studio Resonate Team. I'm your host, Jeanna Isham, owner and founder of Dreamr Productions and Sound in Marketing Learning. I create, consult and educate brands and individuals on the power of sound in marketing. Now on to the show.
Steve Keller has been involved in a lot of notable sound projects through the years, such as coining the term audio alchemy, writing research papers about sonic seasoning, breaking through the sonic color line to address bias, and lack of diversity in sound advertising. And now he's working with Cheez-It Aging cheese to sound. Welcome to the show, Steve. Hi, there. Yeah, I have a rather diverse, background of all kinds of interesting things. So, always thrilled to chat with you, about them.
And this this one in particular. It was a lot of fun. I think it captures everybody's attention when they see that. To think that, cheese might be aged to music. So why don't you walk us through this? Was this Cheez It came to you? Was this something that you and studio resonate and Pandora and all of them came up with a crazy idea. How did this how did this come about? This starts with science. It starts with a study in Switzerland.
Tilo Hoon, one of the researchers, worked with a university there to take pieces of music and age cheese to that music that was just playing 24 / 7. And we'll get into what that's all about a little bit later. But what they found in this study was after six and a half months, there were some perceptible differences in the aroma. And the flavor of the cheese, particularly, in the cheese that was exposed to a hip hop track.
Couple of folks at Leo Burnett, Charlie Von Arcus and Michael Shirley saw this research that came out around, 2019 and, decided that they thought this would be something fun to do with cheese. So they were looking for partners and approached Pandora originally to help curate a hip hop playlist to play with cheese. So that was where we got involved in the course of that conversation.
One of our sales reps said, well, there's this guy at studio Resonate named Steve Keller who does all kinds of weird stuff. So more than likely he knows something about this. So let's bring him into the conversation. And I had a meeting with the creative team at Leo, as well as our sales team. Let them know that I actually was familiar with this, research and that, if we were going to do this, yes, it's fun, but let's, let's be true to the science and see where that takes us.
How did it become more about science than just curating a playlist? As is often the case in marketing and advertising, when folks read about this kind of research, they'll hop on board with the headlines without really diving into, well, what was the impact? How would we duplicate this? It needed to be more than, oh, we're going to put speakers up in a warehouse and play music through the speakers. Really needed to understand what was happening.
So it starts with realizing that what we're talking about is really the impact of sound vibrations on the development of microorganisms. So when cheese or wine for that matter is aging, there are microorganisms that begin to grow. They’re good bacteria and these microorganisms are what contribute to the texture, the aroma, the flavor, of cheese as it's developing.
So what's happening when you're playing these soundtracks to the cheese as it ages, is that the vibrations from the music have an impact on the development of the microorganisms. And that's really what's impacting the flavor and the aroma and the texture of the cheese. So understanding that to begin with, there were two things that we needed to think about in terms of the science. One was how do we make sure that these vibrations are permeating the cheese enough to make a difference?
And then the second thing was that we did want to be true to the original science. They played a number of different music tracks.
As I said, the one track that, seemed to have a difference on the aroma and flavor and texture of the cheese was a hip hop track, but bringing the science back to it in terms of replicating it and understanding vibration, it was probably less about a genre of music, and it was more about certain frequencies and rhythm and tempo in the track that they used in the experiment, which was, jazz. We got it from, Tribe Called Quest.
So what we needed to do to set up the experiment was first to create the audio stimulus that we were going to use. We had, our hip hop curator, J1, pull together a mixtape of tunes that ultimately was going to be pushed out to the general public, so that they could listen to tracks that were used, or inspired by the tracks that we used in the experiment.
And then we took that list, looked at the tracks that were closest in frequency and tempo to that original Tribe Called Quest track, and selected those tracks. And then we did two things. One, we beat matched the tracks, which meant, if we took the original track, which was, I think, around 92 beats per minute, anything that we used, we time compressed or time stretched the track to make sure that it was exactly the same tempo.
So if one of the tracks we use might be 96 BPMs, we would slow it down to 92. Or speed it up, whatever the case would be. And then the other thing we did was took a look at kind of a frequency analysis of the track from the original experiment, and tried to choose tracks that were in the same frequency range and a few of the tracks. We adjusted the EQ slightly to bring the tempo and the frequency in line.
Then the next thing we needed to do was make sure that we had a consistent rhythm all the way through. We couldn't have fade outs and we couldn't have the tracks drop the beat for any extended period of time. So in addition to beat matching, we beat mixed these tracks together, which basically meant we overlapped them. We kept the rhythm going all the way through, and at the end of that process, we ended up with one long track that was a montage of these beat matched tracks.
That was 44 minutes long. So that was going to be our audio stimulus. So that was the first thing that we had to deal with for the first part of the experiment. The second thing was, okay, how do we ensure that we’re maximizing the vibration? Again, it couldn't be that there was just a speaker set up beside the cheese.
We knew from the original experiment because I'd had a few conversations with Tilo, around, what what they were doing, and we knew that they had actually affixed a speaker to the bottom of the box, that each of the cheeses that they were experimenting on were aging in. So we decided to use transducers. Transducer basically takes audio input, translates it into vibration.
And if you hold the transducer in your hand and you run a music program through it, it'll sound like it's coming through a telephone speaker. If you were holding up an old school telephone and hearing kind of the tinny music or sound that's coming from it. However, if you take these transducers and put it on a conductive surface like wood or glass, it actually then takes those vibrations and it becomes sound that we hear.
So it essentially turns the surface of whatever the transducer is placed against into a speaker. So we used four transducers. We went to the plant that manufactured the cheese in Rupert, Idaho, and the cheese was being aged in four drums. So we put a thin layer of plywood over top of those drums, latched it down tight so that there was, you know, connection between the drum and the wood. And then we placed the four transducers with four amps on top of the wood.
We put our program into an MP3 player that then played through the amps, through the transducers, turning the wood into speakers and sending a really powerful vibration through the drums where the cheese was, was aging. So, you know, anything that was sitting on top of the wood that the transducers were on was bouncing around because the vibrations were so strong.
Then we took that entire contraption and put it into a corner of the warehouse, and I felt, a little sorry for the warehouse workers at the cheese plant that for the next six months, we're going to have to deal with hearing the same 44 minute loop of hip hop music over and over and over again. I was going to ask how many, weird looks you got when you started setting this up. How many people were like, are they out of their mind? What is the point of this?
There were certain guys you could tell that they weren't so sure they were going to want to listen to that. But then there were some guys who were like, oh, I want to get transferred into the, warehouse shifts because they heard some of the soundtracks as we were putting it together and, and loved it again, honestly, because of the way it works with the transducers. It wasn't as if we'd filled the entire warehouse with sound. It was fairly isolated to the area where the where the cheese was.
We potentially could have wound up with similar results if we'd had somebody with a hammer that for six months would pound out at a consistent rhythm, a rhythm that would translate into vibration, that would translate into an effect on the, the liquid, and the cheese as it aged and consequently the microorganisms. So that was the first part of the experiment of bringing sound to bear on potentially affecting the flavor of the cheese.
Very different from other work that I've done in Cross-modal science, where we look at what we're putting in your ears, how it can actually shape your perception of flavor. So that's more the realm of psychophysics, kind of how our senses form a sense of reality for us. This was more about psycho acoustics, how the physics of sound and in this case particularly vibration, could have an impact on the environment or on these microorganisms.
While this does seem like kind of a fun, silly, experiment, there are actually some interesting real world applications for us. In thinking about the impact of vibration on our environment. I wouldn't expect any less. I know you don't do things just for the silliness. I know that you want to better the world through sound, just like we want to. Where we can, whenever we can. And I'm curious too. I keep going back to these warehouse workers.
I wonder if if they were stationed nearby for the entire six months, what was the effect on them? The Pavlovian effect? Right. Do they hear a certain rhythm, or do they hear if they hear Tribe Called Quest, do they think of cheese? Well, that's that's something we'll need to go back and revisit at some point. It wasn't something we were trying to control for or even research for, interestingly enough.
As a sidebar, when we think about playlists, in environments, particularly in retail environments. One of the things that's often overlooked brands will, you know, pay attention to how their day parting the music during the day, do they want to have consumers speed up or slow down at different points? Well, who is their target consumer? What's the music that they would be listening to? How does it capture something that's, you know, specific to a brand identity?
But often it's the workers in these environments that aren't thought about. And so sometimes, if you're not careful in building a retail playlist, you'll have it too short so that somebody over the course of their shift, may have to hear the songs looped back around again and again and again. And that's not, that's not good for for them. So, you know, the, the really great, companies that provide playlists do take that into account.
And that's why you, you know, you need hundreds of pieces of music in a playlist to avoid that. Well, and I also I spoke, with someone about directional sound a year or so ago. And we were talking I had a specific example where as an employee, because I worked at, Meyer & Frank, which is a offset of Macy's right out of college. And I used to work in the fine China area, and I hated working the fine China area because it was across from the, the home appliances.
And there was a Dyson vacuum kiosk with a little TV across from it. With that, with that guy with the really soft British voice was talking and it was like a minute long and it just looped and looped and looped and I didn't do it, but other people would go over and just turn it off and right, because it was driving the employees crazy. And I was just like, this is where directional sound would come in very handy, because then I wouldn't have to listen to that sort of thing.
But I digress. Exactly. So so that was, that was where, we left it. I left, Idaho said goodbye to the to the folks at the plant there. And then we had to wait for six and a half months and I would check in from time to time and say, is our loop still playing? Have we had any, issues with anything? Just to make sure that there weren't any, drop outs or anything that would, would affect the experiment? So should I take you through to the next step after that? Yes, I was curious.
And maybe you have another step before this, but what was the, the what was the response from Cheez-It? What was the response from Cheez-It consumers? Yeah, I mean, the consumers come a little a little later in the process because the the plan was we would age this cheese. Hopefully we would see that it did have an impact on the flavor. And then the cheese that was aged would be turned into Cheez It that would be part of a limited edition run of Cheez-It with the sonically aged snack.
As as we we called it aged by audio was the campaign. I think you can still go to agedbyaudio.com. To go to some of the info around this. So obviously there was a lot of promotional material that went into this. And so this was going on in the background, you know, continuing to kind of tweak our consumer playlist, which obviously was going to be much more diverse. You know, a lot more differences in, in tempo, in artist, in the amount of tracks.
So we continue to tweak the consumer facing playlist that would be part of the promotion. We wanted to have an artist tie in. So Sway worked with us, on the promotion, and then there were a whole series of videos, interviews, social media, things that were all built around the marketing of the product that would come later down the road. I hope you're enjoying the show. Stay tuned for next week for the conclusion to our interview. Don't forget to subscribe on all the major podcast channels.
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