Designing the audio identity for a new generation of solar-powered audio devices — from a gaming mode activation sound to a complete system of audio prompts that replaced voice recordings across an entire product line.
Designing sound for consumer hardware is a fundamentally different discipline from app sound design. The sounds are embedded in a physical device, played through its own speaker, subject to its own acoustic limitations — and heard in the world, not on a screen. Every decision has to be tested on the actual product, because what sounds right in a studio may behave completely differently through a small Bluetooth speaker or an earphone driver.
The Urbanista work is a multi-project engagement spanning several products, each building on a consistent audio language that sounds unmistakably like Urbanista across an entire device family.
The work started with a focused brief: design a sound for activating gaming mode on the Urbanista Seoul, a Bluetooth earphone built for gaming. The sound needed to signal a mode change clearly and immediately — functional first, but with character that fit the product's positioning.
This first project established the working relationship and, more importantly, the beginning of a sonic vocabulary for Urbanista products — a foundation that would be extended across subsequent projects.
The next challenge was more strategic. Urbanista's products used voice prompts — recorded speech for states like "power on", "Bluetooth connected", "battery low" — and those recordings had been made by an employee whose voice happened to be unusually deep on the day of recording. It was a pragmatic solution at the time, but an unsustainable one. The same person, with the same voice, wouldn't always be available.
The brief was to find a better solution. I developed a synthesised voice with similar qualities — a defined tone of voice for Urbanista products that could be reproduced consistently, across any product, at any time.
But we went further. For the solar-powered product line — starting with the Urbanista Los Angeles headphones — we began transitioning from voice prompts to pure audio prompts entirely. Rather than hearing "power on", users hear a sound. Rather than "Bluetooth connected", a sound. This is a significant design decision with real strategic consequences: audio prompts are language-agnostic. They work in every market, for every user, without localisation. A voice saying "battery low" in English needs to be re-recorded in every language. A well-designed sound doesn't.
The most demanding project in the Urbanista engagement was the Malibu — a solar-powered Bluetooth speaker. The challenge it presented was qualitatively different from everything before it: a speaker projects sound outward, into the room, for everyone to hear. Earphones play privately, for one person. A speaker plays publicly.
This changes everything. The sounds need to work acoustically through a larger driver with different frequency response characteristics. They need to be appropriate in a shared environment — not startling, not embarrassing, but clear and considered. And they need to feel like a premium product deserves to sound.
I designed the Malibu's complete set of audio prompts — power on, Bluetooth connected, and the full range of device states — and ensured that they worked coherently both as standalone sounds and as part of the broader Urbanista audio language. A user moving between an Urbanista earphone and an Urbanista speaker should experience the same sonic world.
Throughout the project, every sound was tested on the actual hardware. Studio monitoring is a starting point, not a finish line. The acoustic properties of the device itself — its enclosure, its driver, its intended use environment — are part of the design material.
Urbanista's product line now carries a consistent, purposefully designed audio identity across multiple devices. The shift from ad hoc voice recordings to a defined system of audio prompts has made the brand more coherent, more scalable, and more globally accessible.
The work demonstrates what good hardware sound design looks like in practice: strategic thinking about the role of sound, technical understanding of the playback medium, and craft in the execution — all tested in the real world, on real devices, before anything ships.