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We go to theme parks for fun and laughter, but they always makes us feel so much more than this. Discover how powerful audio can make or break and experience on our latest podcast with music maestro Brian Yessian and Katapult's Projects Director, Cathrin Winsor.
How can we create the most emotive guest experiences in themed attractions?
Brian Yessian
Thanks so much for having me, Robbie and Cathrin. This is great. So, my name is Brian Yesian. I'm one of the partners and chief creative officer of Yessian Music. We have studios in New York, Detroit, LA, and a presence in Germany. We are a team of composers, sound designers, and mixers that are creating music for projects all over the world. I got my start. I'm a classical clarinet player, got my start.
Playing in bands and orchestras from a very young age, I think maybe fifth grade, and went on through college to music conservatory and studied in Salzburg, Austria at the Mozart-Tam Music Conservatory. So I was very much a classical clarinet player that wanted to play in orchestras around the world. And then I got sucked into this business, which is amazing, sucked in in a good way. So my father started our company back in 1971. This is our 54th year in business.
He was a jingle writer back in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, writing all types of jingles across the US. Started in Detroit because of the large automotive presence there. And then my brother and I both got involved about 25 plus years ago, 26 years ago. And really realized we had to expand outside of Detroit if we wanted to survive in this industry and expand out of just TV commercials. So we still do plenty of TV commercials, but have entered the world of theme entertainment a good 18, 19 years ago and have not looked back since. We just love it.
Robbie Jones
The great thing about music in general is that it always hits upon an emotive vibe for people. know, music is the only thing I think that can make us happy and sad and come together and feel uplifted. And some of the research that we've done recently into just the wider world is that there's a lot of generations living in what we call in generation dread. There's so much bad things going on, whether it's wars or economic crisis, AI overtaking the world. And in reality, we're at a point now where people just want to feel uplifted.
They want to feel like the world is their oyster and if they're spending one day in a themed attraction or a theme park, it's going to be the best day they can possibly make it. thinking about that, Brian, and thinking about the role of great music and great audio, just how important is it to create an emotive guest experience in themed attractions?
Brian Yessian
Well you make a great point there about, you know, people go to theme parks to get away from the world and be absorbed into a whole new world. with music, I mean, we have to capture the audience, the guests, right from the moment they enter the park. You know, right when they're getting their buy-in, purchasing their tickets, as they're moving into the park, musically, our objective, whenever we're working in an entire park from scratch is to establish something, a feeling, a mood right when people are entering and then have that mood carry and evolve and change and take its various paths through the park and into different attractions. But we want to help people escape from reality, form a new reality for them in this park and music is such an important part of that feeling that people get when they arrive.
So whether it's very emotional, whether it's very happy, whether it's geared towards younger children, whether it's geared towards adventuresome adults. All of those things are being portrayed through what you hear. you know, you're obviously seeing, you're in an environment, you're seeing various landscapes, various structures, but the music really is the driving force that pulls you into that experience.
Cathrin Winsor
And what an amazing storytelling tool music and sound is. I mean, you don't need to speak the same language. You don't need to be able to read. You know, we can cross over so many guest demographics and really bring them on a journey and talking about, you know, nonverbal or nonwritten communication for experiences. Brian, you know, coming from your classical music background, do you find that there's things that you learned about?
Brian Yessian
I think the idea of melody and themes and the reoccurring themes or leitmotifs, things that happen through the music and the way that you'll maybe hear a melody one way, but you may hear it differently the next time it comes around. But it's still familiar to you and it's still creating a baseline, what we call an earworm of pulling you into the track or the song or the score. And so we want to make sure, I mean, one of the goals we always have when people leave an attraction is that they're humming it or they're whistling it or singing it. And it doesn't mean lyrically, it can just mean just the pure melody of the track.
Cathrin Winsor
Do you have a favorite, Brian? Do you have a favorite earworm from an attraction or from a show?
Brian Yessian
Oh God, know, I love, at Disney, love Pirates of the Caribbean. I'll keep singing that all the way off the attraction and my family will get very annoyed with me that I'm, you know, keep going, yo ho ho ho ho. And I'll just hum it, hum it, hum it. And yeah, so they get a little annoyed with me, but they love it too. So, you know, the last time we were in Disney just a few weeks ago, we actually wrote it three times. So I think they actually like it as well.
Robbie Jones
And I guess for attractions that are relying on IPs, it is an amazing way to literally fling people into the story straight away. If they hear that one piece of audio from the franchise or from the movie, they know what they're setting themselves up for, aren't they? From a thematic perspective as they walk in.
Brian Yessian
Absolutely. That's right. And then the great thing is because in a park you have to create not just a few minutes of music, but hours of music. And you can establish that theme or that idea, especially with an IP, with something that is very familiar. But you can then take that and you can weave it in so many different ways and take it to the right side or the left side or down a windy path and give the music even more life and breath that will kind of capture people differently and transform their mood as they move through that land or that area of the park. And that's what's great about when working with IPs, you can expand on those melodies in really unique ways to make the experience very unique to the park and not just the movie.
Robbie Jones
That's a really good point. And Cathrin, pulling that off sometimes, you know, bringing audio into a brand new themed attraction is, can be quite a challenge. There are a lot of facets. What sort of experience have you had around implementing that successfully into an attraction?
Cathrin Winsor
Yeah, well, one of the things that you're chatting with Brian about is just how important it is to get that equipment spec right for one. You know, if you don't, the sound quality is so important to creating that immersive and motive experience. And I think because it's largely invisible, don't really, most people don't really know that much about what it means to have high quality sound and music coming at you. It's, you know, you know, when it's good.
but people don't always know how to explain it, think. So it can be a really difficult thing sometimes to make the case for if you're on a tight budget to help people understand how transformative that can be. And also looking at, of course, transitions in and out of spaces. You can't just put up a wall and stop the sound from coming through. So I think we talked about, Brian, you had some experience with small acoustic tweaks that were making enormous differences. How do you find that sort of challenge when you are finally going out on site? You ever get there and say, this just isn't how it's supposed to sound? What do you do then?
Brian Yessian
Absolutely. That's one of the things we always try to drive home when we're working with a potential client. Right from the initial stages, we're always wanting to make sure that we have the access to the AV integrator and being able to talk to them through what are they planning on designing. Can we look at the schematics of that design for your speakers, your locations, and when we have the creative discussions, we can make sure that whatever we're discussing in a creative way is going to result in positive experiences from implementation in what's being projected from those speakers. So we love to have those calls very early on in the process, talk about if we're creating a large orchestra score, how are those speakers going to be able to project what we're creating.
And if they're not going to be able to, if they're too low quality or not placed right, how can we make that correction early on in the process so we can save lots of time and costs later in the process with change orders and needing to rip out speakers of walls and replace them. Even acoustical matters, looking at the acoustics of the space and making sure that we have good separation between rooms, acoustical absorption materials that are going to make the room feel good and solid and not reflective and having the sound bounce all over the room.
So anytime we can be involved earlier in the process, that's perfect for us because we know then we can deliver a successful product in the end. And all of that matters, the acoustics, the speaker location, the speakers themselves. We're always looking at how do we create an immersive experience for guests, something that's going to pull them in and not have them thinking about, gosh, that doesn't sound very good. Why is that volume so low or why is it just so echoey in here? I can't understand the dialogue in the attraction. So all of these little pieces and parts come together right from the very beginning and we love to be involved in that design aspect phase so that we can deliver the best results.
Robbie Jones
That's brilliant. And it's something we speak about a lot at Katapult is no matter what attraction, what experience we're designing for, we need to consider what the guest thinks and what they feel and what they do. And you hit upon it perfectly there. Sometimes we don't want them to think anything. We don't want them to think, gosh, there's a problem there. We want them to purely feel something or purely do something that's been anticipated by the audio.
Brian, have you ever done a piece that you've completed it but you felt that it's just something didn't feel right? So you had to kind of like go back again and almost fine tune it so personally you were satisfied with it as well.
Brian Yessian
Yes, probably on several occasions. I'm sure there's been moments where we just said, let's just get one more take of this. Let's go back, pull the player back in and just let's try one more time. want to, we feel, you know, sometimes we feel very strongly about that emotion we can capture. And, you know, if it's not setting right in the full scope of work, then yeah, we're going to redo it to make sure it's perfect.
Cathrin Winsor
Well, and to make sure that the sound and music is really truly emotive and living up to its potential, you know, it's so important that everybody be creatively on the same page when you're going about starting to bring in these new these new elements. Of course, you know, it's easy enough to talk about being on the same page creatively when we're dealing in visuals. You know, it's a little bit more intuitive to look at it say, are we telling the same story? Are things sitting well together? But what do you do? What are some things that you look for early on in the process to hook on to creatively to either draw inspiration or alignment so that the creative vision as a whole remains intact? What are some things that you might do there?
Brian Yessian
You know, music is very subjective. Everyone has their own thoughts and feelings of what music should be, what they personally like and grow close to. So we start off very early in the process. We always like to start off with just a research phase. Start pulling ideas and tracks, existing material out there, just to establish an idea of what does everyone like musically? How can we align on a path forward with the music style. And that's a big part of what we do in our early research and just information digging phase, trying to come up with thoughts on music and sound and the feelings we're going for. Once we get through that and we can get kind of an alignment from both our internal team, our clients, their clients, because there's oftentimes lots of layers that we have to go through.
Then that's at that point is when we really start our demo process or when we start getting our composing staff ready to start their initial ideas and themes and melodies and styles of music creation. So we try to go through various steps in the process to make sure that we're all aligned throughout and that we can you know, in the end have a result that everyone's happy with and everyone's on board with.
Cathrin Winsor
Well, talking about getting everyone on the same page and helping everyone have that emotive experience, what about accessibility and sound? You what does that mean? What does that look like?
Brian Yessian
Yes, with sound and accessibility, we've been experimenting with ways to engage an audience, but also be as inclusive as possible. Many attractions that we do, have separate rooms for main shows where the audio might be at a different level to accommodate people that have, whether they have hearing disabilities or they have more of a hearing impairment where it, sounds can be impactful to their well-being.
So we've worked on a lot of projects where we're creating alternate shows to accommodate people in different ways, especially from an audio standpoint. There's also been experiences that we worked on surrounding animals, zoos, marine parks, where certain frequencies may resonate in a negative way with animals. And so we talk to those scientists and those doctors that are working in these institutions to make sure that the audio that we're delivering is also going to be at a respectful level or a frequency that is not going to disrupt the animal behavior. So there's various ways that we're exploring and I think as we move forward in the future, these are things that we're gonna really take hard to in the way that we create music for these attractions.
Cathrin Winsor
I think the animal thing is so fascinating and I can imagine there's a lot of research and sensitivity that goes into that. It's very interesting. On the human front in creating, you know, experiences that don't put people in a bad place or doing toned down shows, things like that, have you gotten any guest feedback on these things? Are they effective for people? We're starting to see more more people exploring these things, but I'm interested to hear if we've gotten any real world kind of feedback.
Brian Yessian
Yeah, know, we, on a couple projects we've worked on, we actually went in and reworked some of the music that we did for some of those experiences because we did get feedback about things that we are maybe not thinking about fully, but large explosions or things that could be a bit more shocking to some of the, has a sensitivity with their hearing. So we actually went back in and we dialed some of those effects and sounds back even further or eliminated them in many cases to make sure that we could accommodate certain groups of people that were coming through the attraction and have an alternate show playing for them specifically.
And in the end, it was a positive result, something that people felt more comfortable with, something that they could take a family member to that has an issue with their hearing and felt comfortable in that experience.
Robbie Jones
Yeah, that's really interesting and it's something, particularly with neurodiversity, that we're looking at in hopefully a lot more detail over the next few years at Katapult where we're due to start a study with the University of Birmingham and a theme park close to us, Drayton Manor, looking at the impact of neurodiversity on themed attractions. I think something that we've kind of figured as we've
looked into the topic over the past couple of years is that there isn't a great deal of research done and in fact this feels like the time to do it. If 20 % of the world's population is showing some form of neurodiversity then that's one in five that are going through our doors or gates. So the ability to best understand what would make experiences even better.
I think it's going to be really interesting to see what we end up coming out with. And something that we have discussed before with industry experts is that actually there might be a point with some people with neurodiversity that actually they want things ramping up instead of ramping down. It might not be about making things quiet. It might be actually, wow, I want to live the explosion. You know, I want to be the physical embodiment of this.
So this is why, this is what hopefully we get to learn out of the out of the research is that it doesn't always mean dial down. It means dial up, dial left, dial right, dial diagonally and being able to give guests the opportunity to, I guess, choose their experience based on their requirements. That will be.
Brian Yessian
So there's some people that have hearing impairments where they've lost hearing or they can't hear at all, like for people that are deaf. And I've watched some studies, actually there was a great study in Japan a few years ago about doing a full symphony, but all through the vibrations in the seats and how various frequencies in those vibrations actually created a melodic idea where people that were you know, had a hearing impairment in the audience, were able to experience a symphony orchestra through vibrations.
So if there's, if there's, you know, we're already using haptics in a lot of attractions that we build. And a lot of times we're actually programming those from an audio standpoint into the, into the seats. And those haptics are all resonating frequencies and, and we're programming that ourselves. If we could create more using that to give people
Robbie Jones
That sounds incredible. And I'm guessing there has been a lot of technological advancements from an audio perspective. Have you seen anything that has been quite revolutionary in terms of what it could potentially bring to a theme park?
Brian Yessian
Just in general from an audio perspective, think, well, I mean, one of the systems we've been using for a while, the hollow plot system, which is in the sphere in Las Vegas, that's the speakers that they use around the entire sphere. And some that we've used now in various attractions like Illuminarium. We've actually been using them for some live shows as well for in the branding world that we work in.
And it's an amazing system that can really laser focus audio and throw audio to a certain distance, have audio reflect off various surfaces so that if you're in any certain point in a room, you'll get your own kind of audio experience. I've gone to some great demonstrations of that.
Holoplots now, since evolving in the sphere is kind of, I think, taking them in to be their own now. So we may not have the access to it like we did before, but I think systems like that where we can A, really pinpoint audio, have audio just go a certain distance in a room to create unique experiences, but also B, have an interactive experience. How can we have audio follow you? How can we give you your own experiences? You're walking through an attraction and just like we do with, from a visual perspective, or maybe we have projection that can map a room and follow a person in an interactive way, having the audio also do that and give people their own experiences, their own unique experiences in an attraction.
Cathrin Winsor
And is there anything in the world of generative AI or other AI tools that is showing promise in your field?
Brian Yessian
We just had a conference call about this last week for an attraction, which I can't talk about, but we were in the early stages of some R &D and looking into how can we use generative AI to evolve music, create the creation of music. A lot of this comes down to our work in interactive and gaming engines. So our team is here have been spending a lot of time working in programs like Unity, Unreal, Wwise, which is an audio program that kind of interfaces with Unreal, and programming audio and creating an image of audio within a space where we can place objects within a space, just like you would in a video game.
But now, how can we take that a step further so it's not only interactive, but it's generative and creating some sort of AI experience where music could evolve or if we're in a large themed entertainment experience, how can we give an audience or guests a different experience every time they come, knowing that there's not a budget to create 5,000 different pieces of music for the same experience, but how can we utilize our audio that we've already created and have it evolve on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, what have you.
Cathrin Winsor
I can imagine the operations staff in particular would be very grateful to you. Guest repeatability is great, but also those people who have to listen to the same looped bit over and over, I'm sure they would appreciate it, mixing it up.
Robbie Jones
I remember something you said to me, Brian, when we met in a theme park last year, which is you don't realize you need audio in a place until it's not there. And it's exactly the same with both in-person entertainment as well as at home entertainment without any sort of audio, any sort of music, the experience just dies a death.
Brian Yessian
Absolutely, it's so true. mean, could you imagine walking to a theme park and there's nothing playing? Or are you going on an attraction and there's no audio? I mean, it really is 50% of the experience. A lot of people say, well, audio, in our process of creating audio, we tend to be a little bit more towards the end of the project. The budgets for audio are much lower than any other aspect of a large scale project but it really is 50% of the experience. mean, if you remove the audio, it would completely remove you from the experience you're in.
Robbie Jones
Cathrin, we've spoken obviously a lot about audio from an emotive perspective, but as we know, as you know, bringing projects together to create a guest experience means that everything comes together, know, cohesively. We know that the staff are on point and they know what they're doing. We've got a lovely thematic, well visualised area and experience that people can just fall into and be inspired by. What are some of the typical challenges of trying to bring all of those elements together to create an experience that guests love?
Cathrin Winsor
I think one of the biggest challenges for us as producers is it's so practical, but it can be very difficult to review all of the elements prior to getting out to site to really understand how they come together. You know, especially when we have IPs involved, lots of different stakeholders who all have to buy off on something, but each thing that you look at, whether it's a, you know, it's a color elevation or it's a it's an image of some fabrication work in process, or it's the music, they're all a little bit different, and it's hard to understand how they come together.
Of course, there are pre-visualization tools which are getting easier and cheaper and better, especially things based on game engines, working in Unreal or Unity, things like that, but at the end of the day, you can't really see these things and you can't really understand how they pick up together.
And obviously, if you wait until installation time to look at those things, then you're really setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment because there's inevitably going to be things that we want to change, right? As creatives, as producers, we're always looking to make the best experience because it's not just about opening day, it's about five, 10 years from now, you know, it's worth the investment to make sure that everything is right. But if you haven't seen everything, very difficult to buy off.
So when there is opportunity in the schedule and the budget, think mockups, especially one-to-one mockups take one space, really use it as an opportunity to showcase a section of the project in its entirety is so worth the money and effort when it can be worked into a project. That's when you can really understand how the sound works with the video, works with the scenic, make a live performer or a host, anything like that. But otherwise you're stuck kind of looking at just one angle of a complete whole. So I think that that's something that we don't always account for. It's a very easy thing to cut because you say, well, you know, what's the point of that? But really what it's doing is saving you from a lot of painful late nights and change orders and change travel plans when you're really deep into that final programming period.
Robbie Jones
And it reminds me of one of the attractions we've, new build attractions created and we did it in VR first of all, and getting some point of view, positions around the themed environment. And even, think we just put in some basic audio. might've just been, you know, gushing of waves or, you know, birds flying overhead. can't quite remember, but, that really helped to solidify the kind of experience we wanted to create. And I believe clients and stakeholders who were involved in the project kind of like that approach as well.
Brian Yessian
Absolutely, you know, the mock-up thing is it's fantastic when that comes together. We actually just came off a project, which I can talk about, utilized a ride vehicle. had a very specific speaker and haptic system in it. It was imperative for us to have access and to kind of work with that system ahead of the final installation. This was a two-year project we were working on.
We were lucky enough to have that vehicle in the vicinity of one of our locations, actually just 20 minutes away. And we're able to go back and forth there for a few months actually, and just test our audio in the ride vehicle. That saved us weeks of onsite mix, just because we could trial and error for a long time in the initial creation process. So for us, that made a world of difference on this particular project because it just gave us access to the actual vehicle we'd be working with and being able to test that audio from a very early stage.
And I think that improved the creative too. mean, because of that testing, we realized that certain sounds or frequencies just were not going to resonate in those particular seats. So we had to go back to the drawing board and recreate some of our music and sound design and effects to really adhere to what the speakers could generate. Because those were already fixed, they weren't changing that, we had to adapt to it.
And then also from the initial shreds of a project, being able to be on the same page with all the vendors and Cathrin, mean, you're doing this all the time, you're trying to wrangle all these different vendors, like you're saying, they're all different, there's different types of feedback you're going to give each one, there's different types of media or sound that they're producing. But if we can all be in alignment from an early stage, so us working with the VFX company, with the lighting designers, with the fabricators, all those, everything's going to affect audio in some way.
And we need to be able to make sure we're collaborating with them and all getting along and all understanding what each other is bringing to the table so that we can create a product that's going to be exceptional in the end.
Cathrin Winsor
I think that that's a really great example too of where pre-visualization tools such as a VR environment are going to fall a little bit short in some instances. You're not going to get that immediate feedback around what literally is resonating in this vehicle. What does that do to the sound and the experience? There's certain amounts of things that we can simulate in a more digital environment, but something like that, it's just not going to be the same, is it?
Brian Yessian
Exactly, exactly right.
