The Power of Silence in Advertising : An Autistic Perspective

by Eric E. Cane

I find pleasing the commercials (on YouTube and other places) where there is no music, just the sound of the environment. I am SO much more engaged when I don’t hear anything but silence or subtle sounds with text and graphics overlaid on commercials. Minimal conversation, that sort of thing. It’s such a tremendous relief and welcome change from the norm.

Case in point: a Tesla ad where their cars are drifting on ice viewed from accompanying drone shots. Beautiful. Just the sound of the cars through the wind displacing snow and ice viscerally. That’s a welcome trend. Having a sound engineering background, I know this may not be a fully authentic representation of what was shot that day, but the finished product at least gave one the impression the experience was authentic. Just the sounds of the product dynamically interfacing its environment.

There are other car ads doing similar, as well as different product advertisements favoring a more natural audio experience without the extraneous claptrap. I take more time watching and listening to these to pick up their subtleties or to simply immerse in environments different than what I have experienced.

There are times when music can enhance a visual experience, but too many advertisers (in my opinion) trade off blasting the audio at the expense of an authentic experience.

The other day, I listened to frost breaking against a person’s thick mittens in a region of northern Norway I had never visited. The sound brought me back to my own childhood on a small farm in northern Wisconsin. I was able to connect, to relive something I had experienced. It made the advertisement welcoming. Memorable.

Now, of course, if everyone did the silent or authentic depiction, then the ads with blaring music would stand out and probably grow in favor. That’s the challenge with designing for fickle humanity — or at least a great chunk of humanity. Nuance. Change. Shocks to the system — or extreme absence of shock. Where reside we who trend reliably with change itself?

Speaking for myself, and my particular autistic perspective, I would rather a consistent experience. I like a grounded return to sameness that allows for settling into less noise, less needing to adapt to an onslaught of sensory disturbances that take me out of calm where my own thoughts are allowed their place. This is a struggle many on the spectrum find themselves facing — the balance where our internal dynamics have to fight for validity and presence in the cacophony of the external environment.

Finding our immersive deep focus experience, something others might call “special interests” (though I prefer the simpler “intense interest”), is an environment of flow state where we can absorb freely and seemingly into the deepest parts of our bodies and minds things that just simply connect with us.

However, such a place is harder to reach when sensory overload from different sources compete for our headspace. We have to deal with an increasingly rising internal emotional angst where, at times, the only escape is actually escaping from it all. Some of us have our rooms sound-proofed as much as possible with calming colors or which contain textures that don’t impress themselves on us, but rather, allow us a shell of comfort where we can recover or just simply exist without having to mask or deal with put-upon persistences from people not us.

This isn’t something entirely foreign to allistic people. When looking around the world, we see others wearing their favorite clothes or colors, driving their favorite cars, meeting their favorite people, going to their favorite bars or restaurants. On the surface, these are just their “preferences”, where our comfort commitments are called part of an abnormality or diverse mentality quite unusual or very different from the norm.

In our neurodiversity, we simply need it to greater degrees. Our biology is tuned to that which allows us to thrive (and sometimes just exist). Where the general population can do without their “preferences”, we have a biology that abruptly demands our “thrive environment”.

Coming from a place where my internal stability demands a level of pure silence or pure “self-tone” in order for me to decrease anxiety that interferes with the simplest of things at times, I seek these silences or tones in the external world. These things might be found in the sound of ice crystals melting in the light of a winter sun or in the gentle presence and acceptance of beautiful friends in whom you find little or no need to spend energy masking.

To help give another perspective on the advertising of products and their possible disruption to someone on the spectrum, I give the following: imagine the vibrating strings of a guitar creating music. Now imagine that these vibrations actually shake your entire body with every strum. Now imagine that strumming doesn’t stop or “breathe”.

Something to others that may sound beautiful can become disruptive to us on a level few get to see — unless our resources are so low we cannot mask well. Having an unrelenting heavy guitar whine or drum track while intercutting 20 different scene changes inside of a 30-second ad is basically all noise and overstimulation that has many of us looking away or reaching for the volume button.

I like ads without sound or with a minimal authentic experience that makes me want to invest my attention because it’s focused, new, simple. Pure. I hope this trend continues. Maybe I’m just being picky, but I know what works for me. Maybe such things work for you as well?

(Please clap and share if you like this writing. Thank you for taking the time to read it.)