A study of the Stanford School of Music which I believe has great relevance to the area of Sound Branding was already released in 2007 (Link to the news release), however; it has yet not been widely discussed in the field of Acoustic Identity/ Sound Branding.
Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from Stanford has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.
The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. The study showed that peak brain activity occurred during a period of silence between musical movements. That may be the answer to the question why some Sound Branding Elements work much better (recognition & recall) than others.
The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity.“In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested,” said the paper’s senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.
Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear—for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony—triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.
By better understanding the process of listening to music, this research has far-reaching implications for how to develop and design Sound Branding Elements and Acoustic Identities.