Bending Type with Sound + Our talk at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust
Updated: Oct 10
Alain’s 2025 experiments on sound-image associations went somewhere unexpected: typography. What happens when letterforms are experienced together with music? Type takes on rhythm, cadence, and emotional weight that bends its meaning. During the talk ‘Bending Type with Sound’ at the Bawa Trust in Colombo, Alain unpacked how music can be used with letterforms.
How we use playlists to design brand stories
In our studio work, we often need to transition between brand worlds without mixing up their voices, visual styles, moods, narrative outlooks and so on. Two hours spent creating stories for a brand that evokes rebellion and heroic rasa could easily be followed by hours that require designing for a brand world built around gentleness and tranquillity. To transition quickly from one world to another, we use music playlists. If everyone in the room is working in the same brand world, we play it out loud; if not, we retreat to different worlds on headphones. These playlists are rarely mixed; like portals into different worlds that best not collide.
What makes music such a potent tool for accessing, building and managing brand worlds? Music can translate abstract brand moods and values into an immediate, sensory reality. Unlike visual and written narratives, which require active attention, music operates on a cognitive and emotional level. Music can bypass critical filters and establish a brand's narrative with little effort.
Brand playlists are almost always creative process management tools for us. But sometimes, our clients make special requests for these playlists too; because if you own a restaurant, a cafe, a hotel, or a retail space, sound is a make-or-break element in that story. The most recent client who asked for their own brand playlist used it to dream away over a glass of wine and imagine the future activities in his new business space that’s still under construction. That’s a great way to use a brand playlist.
At the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, we explored how these playlists can be used to design stories; how rhythm and rasa can shift meaning in ways that go beyond form. The conversation moved from synesthesia to brand playlists, but always circled back to one central question: what happens when music is used to contrive the story.
If you haven’t met Alain, here’s a bit about him: Alain Parizeau co‑founded Public Works with his partner Shamalee; it’s a studio primarily combining image and language for commercial story design. His practice blends Jungian theory, rasa aesthetics, and brand-persona‑driven playlists to unlock emotional resonance in design. A systems thinker and educator, Alain explores how narrative, sound, and visual language intersect, helping businesses articulate meaning beyond form into cultural and emotional fluency.
