See Yourself in Sound

Read the campaign story

Bang & Olufsen launched See Yourself in Sound in June 2023 with Hello Monday/DEPT. The agency account describes a website producing animated avatars from Spotify listening history or a questionnaire, with related social and store activity. These formats belong to one platform rather than separate cases for each avatar or activation.

The account describes an expressive experience, not a validated method of understanding personality or emotional state. This study adopts no sales or psychological result. Its useful decision is how to make personalisation enjoyable without asking people to confuse an attractive output with an authoritative description of themselves. A creative response can be meaningful while remaining partial, playful and open to rejection.

Editorial interpretation: preference data can provide a starting point for a visual conversation rather than a final answer about identity. The system should make its rules sufficiently legible for someone to understand why a shape appeared. Total opacity may feel magical initially, but it makes correction difficult and can encourage unwarranted assumptions about what the organisation knows.

Editorial interpretation: an alternative route matters strategically as well as practically. Someone may want the experience without linking an account or sharing extensive history. A lightweight manual choice can preserve the central creative reward. Teams should test whether the extra data genuinely improves the experience before assuming that more detailed access is necessary for relevance or delight.

Explain the mapping without exhausting the surprise

Show a few understandable relationships between choices and visual features. The explanation need not reveal every production detail, but it should prevent the output from appearing like a hidden psychological judgement. Ask reviewers what they believe the system inferred. If those beliefs exceed the supplied information, revise the framing rather than celebrating the misunderstanding as evidence of a magical experience.

Make refusal and revision part of the design

Allow people to skip an input, change a choice or reject the result. A personal response should not become a label that follows someone elsewhere without a deliberate decision. Compare a fixed output with an editable one. The ability to disagree may make the experience more credible because it acknowledges that preferences are contextual and not a complete account of a person. Include a deliberately mismatched sample result and ask whether reviewers feel comfortable rejecting it. A personalised design should invite interpretation rather than require agreement with the system’s description.

Measure expressive usefulness separately from sharing

A shareable output can travel because it looks striking, not because it accurately represents anyone. Ask whether reviewers understand the intended meaning, enjoy the choices and feel control over the result. Do not treat sharing as permission for broader profiling. The test should investigate the creative mechanism without collecting information that would be unnecessary for a simple communication decision.

A small test for another brief

Proposed adaptation: let adults choose three fictional reading-room moods from printed cards and combine original shapes into an optional poster emblem, explaining each mapping.

Measure whether reviewers can explain how the emblem was formed and whether they feel free to disagree with it. Compare an unexplained output with a clearly mapped version using identical artwork. Ask which inputs seem unnecessary. Prefer the version that preserves enjoyment while reducing mistaken beliefs about personality analysis, hidden surveillance or the permanence of the label.

Stop if reviewers interpret the emblem as a psychological assessment, feel pressured to disclose private information or cannot withdraw from the exercise.

• Use sample preferences rather than private histories.
• Provide an editable result and a skip option.
• Enable no account connection, tracking or public sharing.