Why Don’t Websites Use Sound?
By: Univers Labs
Tags: User Experience, Technology, Web Development, Web Design

It’s a question I sometimes ask myself, having grown up in the era of Adobe Flash websites and Myspace profiles with your favourite songs installed. 15 years ago sound was much more prevalent on websites. I’ve recently returned from a trip to Japan and let me tell you something; Japan embraces sound at every opportunity, it’s overwhelming.

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

On my return from my trip to Japan, to provide some relief from holiday blues, I went to my favourite local Japanese restaurant and visited their site to find a phone number. I was amused to hear some music on the site! Not a great website but it’s Japanese, and it features music, check it out here.

It got me thinking, why do we in the west not use sound on websites? Maybe it’s a cultural thing? If you watch the typical documentary on North Korea, a big thing they empathise is the constant propaganda pumping out from loudspeakers on the streets.

The street level sound is something you get in Japan as well, everything talks, sings, informs and exclaims. Shibuya like crossings across japan regularly feature live tv, and when exploring the streets of Japan you often pass an arcade, accidentally triggering the automatic door, releasing a cacophony of noise.

In the evening, residential streets have calming piano music often in polyphonic ringtone style, or more often than not some dinner jazz. Each train station has its own jingle and set of birdsong, presumably to auto awake sleepy commuters.

In the western world, I can’t think of a parallel, music in our culture music is personal, we wouldn’t play music from loudspeakers in the street, because first off it would be annoying and secondly how would it be to everyone’s taste? When I ask around, “Why don’t people use sound and music on websites anymore” Those are the two words I hear, it’s annoying and not my taste.

I’ve seen a lot of website projects in my time and the thought of adding sound often crosses my mind, purely to differentiate, to stand out in the crowd. You see big established businesses like Bloomberg making crazy bold and different website designs that really grab your attention. Featuring animation, video, bold typography and layouts. Surely the next step is using sound?

One article on this subject by Simon Mills from Liquid Light who made an excellent point, in film he argues picture and sound work together, the sound evokes emotions and connects to the viewer, but the key to the process is to not distract you from the experience.

Another Quora article exclaims “NEVER USE SOUND WITHOUT THE USERS PERMISSION”. Again this goes back to the premise that it’s not to taste, and I agree it’s annoying if a tab in your browser starts making a sound, in fact, it reminds me of those pesky adverts and popups hidden away that you desperately try to find and close.

The point is that nowadays it’s a massively accepted or enforced user experience rule that you should never make a sound without the permission of the user. But then again aren’t rules there to be broken?

Here are some example websites that use sound

The Wilderness Down

An Arcade Fire, interactive Music Video designed by new media artist Chris Milk. Chris Milk inspired me to take website development and design seriously and was a big inspiration for starting a digital business.

Chrome Music Lab

Chrome Music Lab is a website that makes learning music more accessible through fun, hands-on experiments.

Super Looper

Plug alert, we made this.

Peanut Gallery

Create your own inter titles to silent film.

ZOMBO.COM

This example is a parody. This is ZomboCOM anything is possible on zombocom. Zombo.com is a single-serving site that was created in 1999, utilising the new technology of Flash animation. Formerly a faculty and student joke from the George Washington University Center for Professional Development, the site parodies Flash introductory web pages that play while the rest of a site’s content loads.

10 Hotel websites that use sound

An interesting article about websites that use autoplay sound to delight users and increase conversion rates and an interesting debate on the subject in the comments.