“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent”
(Victor Hugo)
Web Site Designs deal with limited sensory input. I think I might be one of the first to say that there is an element of touch that affects navigation. It’s not exactly tactile, but it affects our motion senses. The ease to reach buttons on a site, the reaction and the delay after a mouse movement is performed gives a tactile quality to websites. Think about it: when was the last time you saw your hand as it moved the mouse? Other than that, we’re far, far away from using other senses to navigate through the web other than sight and sound.
Sometimes I’m glad it’s like that. Can you imagine a scratch n’ sniff screen? Given the content of some sites, I predict crass results.
The way it is righ now
When we talk on web site designs, we prioritize sight over other senses. It’s part of the world we live in: looks matter. The Internet has been praised as the multimedia equivalent of the cat’s pajamas. People spend time producing contents for different types of formats and media that end up here, in the web. But we live in a visual culture. The most immediate signals like, say, a Stop sign, were design not to be heard but SEEN!
That was the key element on the development of the Internet: programmers were looking for ways to get smoother, lighter images they could add to their sites. Navigation was thought as a visual system to get information in a quick, comfortable way. Menus haven’t changed that much aside of a few makeovers and the layout of most websites is the same. I can’t say it’s lack of originality here: it works.
The way it shouldn’t be
I’m not crazy about music on websites. In fact, I just hate it. Unless I’m browsing through an artist’s site, I don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t come from my Ipod, my stereo, my portable tape recorder (yeah, I’m into retro stuff) or whoever is on the other room… and not even that.
It was bad when people would add these cheesy MIDI renditions of other tunes or when they would dare to load those heavy .WAV files of The Hamster Dance. Now everyone has a way to program their own playlists (on their own computers or online). It is disruptive and detracts from the navigation experience. This is Web 2.0 (and Web 3.0 is biting our ankles as we speak)…
…we no longer are surprised to hear sounds coming from our computer. So knock it off!
Why it might be a bad idea
- It makes your site heavier and slower to download
- It might be disruptive to the visitor, who might be listening to his own playlist or just maybe not willing to hear a MIDI rendition of Richard Clayderman’s “Adeline”.
- It’s really really hard to get good songs without having legal issues about copyright and intellectual property. Do you want to go through that?
- You cannot guess your visitors’ taste. You might end up losing conversions and customers by little details like that.
- If you use a low sampling rate and compress the living daylight out of your songs, the quality will be reduced dramatically and it doesn’t really attract traffic.
In the end…
Muzak conveys immediately the image of supermarkets and elevators (not exciting scenarios unless.. uh.. nevermind…). It adds to the drone aura these places tend to have.
However, if you’re launching a band or a multimedia product, you want to convey the experience in the best possible way. Flash might come in handy for music players of movies and, for the love of all things nice and smooth, do your best to ROCK! There are sound engineers and musicians out there that, for a reasonable fee, will do an awesome work for your site.
So: do you want music on your site? Give it some though, sleep over it
