The shortest history of one of the most recognizable sounds in advertising.
Regarding that quintessential «psssh» sound you hear in advertisements, most people think, «Well, they just opened a can.» But in reality, it’s not a can—it’s a synthesizer.
In 1974, Susan Channing was living in New York nearly starving. She spent two years trying to get into the city’s largest advertising agency, McCann Erickson, but she consistently received rejections. One day, she couldn’t take it anymore and burst into the studio of the music director, telling him, «I know how to create sounds you haven’t heard yet.»
At that very moment, the studio was working on a Coca-Cola commercial. She was given five minutes. She ran home to retrieve her massive Buchla synthesizer (five road cases), returned, and synthesized right there what later became one of the most recognizable sounds in advertising history.
Fizz. Sizzle. Pour. Bubbles
Everything is without a single actual can. Just white noise, filters, and voltage control. And specifically without a fixed tone height—so this sound can be placed in any video, in any key, as many times as you want.
Since then, this «pshh» has sounded millions of times. And almost no one knows that it isn’t soda. It’s a woman with a synthesizer who once just really wanted to eat.