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Our final element of good acoustic engineering is ambience.

Ambience has to do with how much reverberated sound is desired within a space to create a specific effect.

For example, in a concert hall, reverberation after the music has finished is considered “resonance” and is often desirable for creating mood.

On the other hand, in a theater, where the clarity of spoken words is the most important thing, reverberation becomes an obstacle to intelligibility and is typically suppressed as much as possible.

This battle between clarity of expression and creation of mood creates a tug-of-war which can only be determined by deciding the ultimate goal or purpose of the space and the sound to be presented in it.

So what’s the point?

The next time you go to post something online, ask yourself:

“Am I trying to convey information, or emotion?”

Most likely, the more you succeed at one, the less you will succeed at the other.

Principle #2 of good acoustics: increase clarity

Once we have minimized distracting external noise, we can focus on making sure that the sound or message that we want to get across is as clear as possible.

Clarity of sound in a physical space involves maximizing the amount of direct sound from the source to the hearer and minimizing sound reflected from the environment.

In the context of media communications, we might translate this principle to something like:

Reflected sound is not all bad though. When controlled and used properly, it becomes the central ingredient in the third principle of acoustics, ambience.

More on that tomorrow.

The first aspect of engineering good acoustics is to reduce noise.

This is pretty self-explanatory. Noise is extra sound which detracts from and lowers the impact of the sound you want to be heard.

The internet is full of “noise.”

So, in what ways are you engineering the environment in which your content exists that reduces that constant noise as much as possible?

When it comes to communicating effectively, I think the idea of acoustics is just as important in the virtual or theoretical sense as it is in the physical world.

In the world of architecture and space design, acoustic engineering is concerned primarily with three things:

1. Reducing noise
2. Increasing clarity
3. Controlling ambience

These three elements are just as important to consider when we’re engineering a virtual context in which we plan to communicate something of value as they are when designing a concert hall.

We’ll dive into how each one might apply to our digital communications in the next few days.

Form is only one part of an equation that adds up to effective communication. Another major factor is the context.

To get an idea of how form and context inform each other, consider watching a movie in a dark room versus reading a physical book in a dark room.

A dark room may be the best environment to experience the full impact of a film, but it will make it impossible to get any effect at all from the physical book.

It doesn’t matter if the book is War and Peace or Curious George, if we don’t connect the form to the context, the content may become totally irrelevant.

When deciding what form to use for your online communications, it’s important to consider how you want to be perceived.

Each medium naturally carries with it certain preconceptions and emotional responses on the part of the audience.

For instance, podcasts and video are great at conveying personality, which creates a sense of comradery between the speaker and the audience. Meanwhile, a blog post strips the same message down to a purely intellectual focus, giving the author a more authoritative relationship to the audience.

Of course, there is latitude within each of these mediums—video can be highly intellectual and authoritative, and you can be very relatable and friendly through your writing style—but it’s important to keep in mind that a little extra effort is required to swim upstream of the medium’s innate tendency.

How do you decide if video or blogs or podcasts or any other medium is the best way for you to get your message across online?

Consider how you communicate IRL on a daily basis. I think most people show natural leanings for certain mediums in small ways all the time.

Some people can’t bear to be on-camera but will send the most detailed and thorough emails you’ve ever seen, while other people are terrified by a blank page or blinking cursor, but will spend an hour telling you everything about their work, unprompted, sitting across a cafe table.

Whatever mode it is that naturally gets you to spill your heart for your work is probably a good place to start, but that doesn’t have to be where you end.

Remember those toy megaphones from when you were a kid? You know, the ones with buttons to make your voice sound like a robot or a chipmunk or an alien.

It was fun to explore different voices, but they were all kind of hard to understand until you put the megaphone down and just used your normal voice again.

The internet is pretty much the same way. It can be fun (or scary) to explore video and podcasts and blogs and all the rest, but until you know how it is that you best communicate, your content will probably sound artificial and a little garbled.

I consider this the Hippocratic Oath for content creation. If we are going to participate in the so-called “attention economy” by creating content at all, it is important to respect the attention we are asking people to pay to us.

Really what this means in practice is to consider the value that we are providing through the content we create rather than simply the value we are hoping to capture.

When we focus on communicating something worth paying attention to in the first place and engineer a context in which it can be clearly understood, we are laying the foundation for a reciprocal value exchange by being the first to offer an open hand.

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P.S. This is especially true for video content which has a fixed time-cost associated with it in a way that most other media doesn’t.