How Audio Diversity Impacts Branding: A Conversation with Steve Keller - Part 1

“We should be hearing diverse voices. As I like to say, if the only time we’re hearing voices of color is in advertising to those segments, then we’ve not just segmented those voices, we’ve actually segregated them. So let’s lean into sonic diversity. You’ll create better representation and a better relationship for your brands with those communities at the same time, without having any negative impacts on your ad’s favorability or effectiveness.” -- Steve Keller

This episode’s guest is the Sonic Strategy Director for Studio Resonate, SiriusXM Media’s in-house, audio-first creative consultancy offering support to brands that advertise on the Pandora, SiriusXM, and Soundcloud platforms. He’s recognized as a leading authority on sonic strategy, blending art and science into award-winning creative content and sonic experiences for a variety of global agencies and brands. With a degree in psychology and business, and over thirty years of experience in the music and advertising industries, his research explores the ways music, sound, and voice influence our perception and behavior and his writing on the subject can be found in a very large list of publications.

His name is Steve Keller, and he and I first spoke in the very early days of this podcast, right before the pandemic started. I still consider his episode the most pivotal of this podcast, and he blew my mind on multiple occasions. He certainly does it again here, and you’ll get to hear it!

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(0:00:00) - Exploring Sonic Diversity in Media

As we start our conversation, Steve tells us about his early memories of sound, including a surprising childhood discovery he made about train whistles. “One of the things I found out from talking to one of the engineers,” he explains, “is that there are patterns in the whistles almost like Morse code.” We talk about the subtext of sound that’s often hidden in plain sight, and how our unconscious biases can limit sonic diversity, whether it’s the vocal range audio codecs are built around or the roles AI voices are assigned. “We live in a diverse world,” Steve says. “We should be hearing diverse voices.”

(0:11:27) - Navigating Bias in Sonic Diversity

“One of the things that we’re trying to promote,” Steve tells us, “is to make sure that the synthetic voices that are being created are diverse, that the training populations that are used in developing these voices, that there’s diversity there.” We discuss how the early days of telephone and radio created audio biases that we’re still working to overcome, and the role AI voices will play as they continue to evolve. “The majority of them said yes, they could tell a difference,” Steve recalls a neuro-based study he led on distinguishing between human and AI voices, “but when we tested it, it was a flip of a coin whether or not they’d get it right. And the AI voices have improved even since we did that test.”

(0:23:54) - Implications of AI in Advertising

Steve tells us more about his work with AI, including the murky legal questions surrounding how AI learns and, much like human writers, borrows inspiration from what it’s learned. “A similar thing can happen with AI if you’re using copyrighted materials in the training sets,” he says. “So the AI could be drawing from a phrase, and there may be a way to document that it drew from a particular phrase, and that violates copyright.” We talk about AI’s growing role in advertising and audio branding and the legal pitfalls of relying on AI-generated music when it comes to copyright laws. “Are they incorporating AI into some of their performance libraries,” Steve asks. “Because until we get a handle on what the training sets are, there’s the potential that there could be copyright infringement.”

(0:30:00) - Navigating Brand Trust in AI

Our discussion turns to the interaction of machine and human minds, and how new algorithms can collide with our old-fashioned brains. “We may have gotten more sophisticated in how we think,” Steve explains, “but emotionally, which is really the driver for us, we haven’t changed much in millions of years.” We talk about the rise of deepfake media, and how we might adjust to living in a world where seeing and hearing are no longer believing. “It’s easier to start from the default of ‘I can believe that,’” Steve says, “to the default of ‘I don’t want to trust anything.’ You know, as psychologists, we would say somebody who lives in that condition lives in a condition of paranoia.”

Episode Summary

• Steve’s childhood in West Virginia and Studio Resonate’s research on sonic diversity.
• How audio technology has historically excluded certain voices and accents.
• The breakthrough success of AI-generated audio and the legal challenges it can cause.
• Knowing what’s real and what isn’t in a world driven by AI content.

Tune in for part two of my conversation with Steve as we talk about the hidden value of AI-powered audio branding, how social media algorithms have changed the way songs are written and performed, and who came out on top in a surprising study his company did on AI vs human marketers.

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