The Sound Of Luxury

Designers are engineering aural sensations – a supercar’s roar, a grande sonnerie’s chime – to drill deep into your subconscious and leave a lasting impression. Then you’re hooked. Who knew noise had become so valuable?

- Lucy Alexander

NOTHING ABOUT THE feeling of driving a Lamborghini is accidental. According to Maurizio Reggiani, the marque’s chief technical officer, the sensation springs directly from the noise of those 12 screaming cylinders. That high-pitched roar triggers excitement, a key component in a precisely calibrated chain of events that takes your ears, the car, then your stomach from zero to 100 in a little over two seconds.

“When you are in a super-sports car, the sound becomes part of your emotions,” says Reggiani. “It becomes part of your perception of speed. If you hit the gas, you expect to hear a tremendous sound that tells you you are accelerating really fast. In an airplane, when you hear the engines run, you think, ‘OK, my God, now we’re starting’ and after that you start to feel the acceleration. This is exactly the conjunction between what you hear, what you anticipate your body will soon perceive and then what you actually experience.”

The sound of luxury has moved from abstract concept into strategically manufactured reality over recent years, as more and more brands at the highest end of various industries, from champagne to haute horology, attempt to use our aural cavities to seduce us into a subconscious sensory relationship. Why? Because emotional connections are deeper and harder to break than logical ones. But what makes sound emotional? Is a feeling real when it’s been engineered by a scientist or implanted by a marketing consultant? And what form will sensory branding take in an increasingly digital world?