In a world where music has become so accessible, it has become easy to overlook the importance of music. Every song ever recorded now fits in your pocket, free, instant, infinite. And somewhere in the process of getting everything, we stopped hearing any of it. Sound became wallpaper. The thing playing in the background while we do the thing that supposedly matters.
I think that is one of the quietest losses of the last twenty years, and almost nobody talks about it. We have never had more sound around us and never paid less attention to it. We have become, in a strange way, a little deaf. Not in the ears. In the noticing.
Which is funny, because the person who taught me how much sound is worth could not hear it.
The professor
In high school I took American Sign Language. Not out of some noble plan, but because it fit my schedule and it was not Spanish. My teacher was Deaf, a graduate of Gallaudet, the only university in the world built entirely for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students. He was, to put it gently, not interested in making the class easy. He gave me a hard time. He gave everyone a hard time. He ran that room with a precision and a low tolerance for laziness that I did not appreciate at sixteen and think about constantly now.
Here is the part that stuck. I walked in assuming I was the one with the advantage. I could hear. He could not. Obviously I had the fuller experience of the world. By the end I understood I had it exactly backward. He had spent his entire life in a relationship with sound, with its presence and its absence, with the way hearing people treat it as free, like air, like something you are owed rather than something you are handed. He paid attention to sound precisely because he could not take it for granted. I had been swimming in it my whole life and had never once looked at the water.
So that is where this actually starts. Not with a love of music. With a Deaf man who made me realize I had never really been listening.
What I was made of
I came in with some equipment, to be fair. I grew up around instruments. Flute first, then xylophone, enough music theory to understand why the things I liked worked, later a guitar, and a Tombak, the Persian goblet drum, which is the one that ties me back to where my family is from. I was not a prodigy and I will not pretend otherwise. What all of it gave me was less a skill than a habit. I learned to hear a piece of music as a built thing. To notice the parts. To know that the feeling a song gives you is not an accident. It is architecture, and someone chose every beam.
That habit curdled, predictably, into a mild obsession with sound quality. This part is a little insane and I know it. I listen on a pair of Sennheiser HD 660S headphones run through a dedicated DAC, and I love that small setup with an affection that is probably not entirely reasonable. I am the person who cannot fully enjoy a song coming out of a phone speaker, not because I am a snob about it, but because I know what is being thrown away. Most people have never actually heard the music they love. They have heard a compressed, flattened postcard of it. I find that quietly heartbreaking, and yes, I am aware of how that sentence sounds.
Glass
For a few years I worked on the brand and the experience around Cybersole, which, if you are not in this world, needs a little explaining. Cybersole is checkout automation software, the kind sneakerheads and collectors use to have a real shot at limited drops that vanish in seconds. In its corner of the internet it is not a tool, it is a status object. Famously hard to get, expensive, the thing people screenshot to prove they have it. When a product carries that kind of meaning, every detail of how it feels starts to matter, including, it turned out, how it sounds.
At one point we set out to give Cybersole its own sound. Not licensed music laid over a video, but a true sonic identity: the small native noises the software itself would make. The tone when a task succeeds. The one when it fails. The alert when the system needs your attention. We brought in a sound engineer to build it from scratch. The project never shipped, and I would still rank it among the most useful things I have ever done, entirely because of what trying to do it forced me to work out.
You cannot brief a sound engineer the way you brief a designer. There is no reference image to hand over. You have to describe a thing that does not exist yet, in a language that was never built for the job. So we ended up talking about materials. He asked me, essentially, what this sound was made of. If a Cybersole checkout success had a physical substance, what would it be.
I said glass.
I did not have to think about it. It was glass. The brand was clean, precise, a little cold, expensive, transparent in the way that lets you look straight into a mechanism. Glass.
Then he asked the question that genuinely rearranged how I think about design. What kind of glass. Clear glass? Frosted, matte glass? Translucent glass? Because those are three completely different sounds. Clear glass is bright and ringing and a little brittle. Matte glass is softer, rounder, muffled at the edges. Translucent sits in between, light passing through but diffused.
I had never in my life considered that a sound has a material. A temperature. A weight. A finish. But of course it does. We had a whole working theme by then, safecracking, the idea that a successful checkout should feel like the exact instant a vault gives way. The safe opens. We're in. The reward sound had to land like a jewel, bright and tonal and precious, with just enough decay to feel like a real object settling into your hand. The failure sound was its opposite, dull and clipped and metallic, cold, gone almost before it arrived. Same value every time, but one of them was a celebration and the other was a door closing.
Years later I found out there is a whole field behind this. Researchers like Charles Spence at Oxford study what is called crossmodal correspondence, the consistent, predictable ways our senses borrow from one another, the reason a sound can taste sharp or look round or feel like glass. My instinct in that conversation was not poetic license. It was a real and measurable property of how human perception works. That is the part I would ask any founder or marketer to sit with for a second. The softest, least quantifiable creative call you can imagine, what is this brand made of, turns out to sit directly on top of actual cognitive science. The feeling is the data. We just have not learned to respect it as such yet.
The restock
The other half of the work was louder and reached far more people. Cybersole, like most things that sell out the instant they appear, used to do restocks, brief windows where a few more copies went on sale. And restocks, if you look at them honestly, are a little cruel by design. A handful of people win. Thousands refresh a page, lose, and feel like garbage. The whole emotional engine runs on scarcity, which is just another way of saying it runs on making most of your audience feel left out.
I did not love that. So I pushed to turn the restocks into something closer to events. Not a silent page blinking from sold out to available and back, but a built experience with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Something that gave everyone who showed up a reason to have shown up, win or lose. If you are going to gather thousands of people in one place at one moment, the least you can do is make it a place worth being, instead of a lottery most of them are about to lose.
And the spine of that experience was the music. For the 4.0 and 5.0 launches I put more than fifty hours into choosing the tracks. Two weeks of my life, give or take, spent picking the song that felt right. These we licensed, real music, which meant the job was selection rather than creation, and selection is its own kind of obsession. I would listen to candidates back to back to back, two or three minutes each, the same handful of tracks again and again, waiting to feel the difference. I would do it at home, and then, when my ears went numb to it, I would do it in the car on late drives through the Berkeley hills, where for whatever reason the right track always announced itself. I would run the video in my head, scene by scene, frame by frame, the cut timing, the product reveal, the moment the logo lands, and play each piece of music against that internal edit until one of them stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the only answer.
Because that is the test, and it is the same test as the glass. Does it fit the material. The audience was sneakerheads and collectors, people with taste, people who can smell a corporate stock-music cue from a mile off and will quietly hold it against you. The track could not just be hype. It had to feel the way the brand felt, precise and a little untouchable, the audio version of the thing they were lining up to be part of. When it was right, you did not notice the music at all. You just suddenly wanted the shoes. That is the entire job. The music was not sitting on top of the feeling. The music was the feeling.
The channel no one is fighting over
So here is what I believe, after all of it.
We are told we live in a visual world, and we treat that as a reason to pour everything into how things look. I think it is exactly the opposite. In a world this saturated with images, where everyone has the same fonts and the same gradients and the same camera in their pocket, the eye has gone numb. Sound is the channel almost nobody is fighting over. It is the most underpriced asset in the room.
And it works on a level the visual cannot reach. Sound skips the part of your brain that argues. It does not go to committee. It goes straight to the older, faster, emotional machinery and rings the bell before you have decided how you feel. The numbers, for the people who need numbers, are not subtle. Nearly every one of the world's largest brands now runs a deliberate sonic identity, and ads carrying a sound cue are many times more likely to actually land than the same ad with visuals alone. Sound is not decoration. It is one of the highest-leverage, least-contested tools you have, and most companies are leaving it completely on the table.
But I did not learn that from a study. I learned it from a Deaf professor who paid closer attention to sound than anyone I have ever met, while living entirely without it. He understood the thing most hearing people never bother to: that sound is not free, and it is not background, and the moment you start treating it as either, you lose the ability to use it.
Almost everyone can hear. Very few people listen. The whole advantage, in branding and in just about everything else, is remembering how.