Week 9 Session: The Sonic Floor
The music in a supermarket was never for you to enjoy. Its only job is your walking speed, and it has been doing that job the whole time you thought you were browsing in silence
19 April 2027
Before the session#
Notice the music on your next visit, deliberately, for once. Note where in the store it changed.
In the session#
Retail sound design sets a walking pace the way a metronome sets a tempo, and it varies by zone — slower near high-margin fresh goods, quicker near the checkout so the queue doesn’t feel as long as it is. This is the sonic floor: an ambient instruction you comply with before you’ve registered it as an instruction at all.
Afterwards#
Everything so far has worked on your body without your consent. Week ten is the first mechanism that asks for it directly, and gets it.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you can name the tempo of the music playing the last time you noticed it
- you can say whether it sped you up or slowed you down, and where in the store
- you can describe a store with no ambient music at all, and what that absence would do instead
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor