SpeaK: A Methodology to Communicate About Sounds

The first meetings of a sound design project aim to present the request which may concern different aspects, such as pleasure and functionality of the sound of a new product, or identity of a brand. It is then crucial to elab-orate recommendations for the sound designer. However, the major difficul-ty encountered is to specify the request in terms of sound features. The Speak methodology is based on an efficient co-design workshop to help participants to specify their request with words related to sound features. This methodology is based on a lexicon composed of 35 words often used by professionals to described sound features. Each word is related to a sound feature explained by a definition and highlighted by a corpus of sound examples, and is associated with a card used by the participants dur-ing the brief meeting. Using this methodology, participants are actively in-volved in the process to develop sound recommendations.