Commercial music remains a key concern; Elias recently scored Nike "Tag" with a tense-yet-fun whining break-beat track seemingly intertwined with the film's action (for W+K, Portland). But Scott Elias considers music too powerful a touch point to be relegated to solely TV spots.

"There's been a lot of talk about how products are better understood as experiences. Like a restaurant, it's not just food, but lighting, wait staff, music, environment and who else is there. All of those components become part of the experience," says Scott Elias.

With this in mind, Elias Arts recently created music and sound for IBM's Global Online meeting, a site visited by roughly 200,000 brainstorming IBM employees. Beyond new media (games, Websites or WAP's), both products (appliances, computer hardware and wireless devices) and environments (retail spaces, offices or public transit) are ripe for the Elias treatment. An unnamed PDA company is seeking aural links for its wireless applications and electronics giant Sony has also registered interest in what Scott Elias refers to as sonification technology.

"Sonification is the smart application of music and sound; where, when and how to use it so it's respectful of people, using sound to respect the silence," he postulates. "Sound can really guide people, it can support and clearly it can be interruptive when it needs to be. It should also understand; for instance if you visit a Website several times, should it give you the same sound every time or perhaps evolve with you?"

The technology, be it audio software or microchips, is readily available; the challenge, says Elias, is creating cohesive communication delivering coherent experiences. This involves recognizing the changing dynamic between companies, brands and consumers. Brand strategy and researching and designing innovative consumer experiences are part of Elias' plan to address this situation.

"We are developing software allowing companies to deploy [music & sound] to meet these needs of consumers. There is an implicit trust in many of the newer consumer vehicles not necessarily implied in more traditional ones," says Scott Elias. "Arnold and Cliff Freeman & Partners have done this really well by using humor. They've taken the implied trust and put humor into it, moving away from telling to inviting."

Taking into account ideas from fields like psychoacoustics (determining how people interpret sounds they hear and whether they find this sonic stimulation useful, disturbing or otherwise), Scott Elias says the company is moving away from a push approach towards a process of co-creation. His brother Jonathan, a composer and arranger, helps connect these ideas with the basics of their business, music.

"Music is music whether I am telling the story for a film score or for directional/navigational sound; it's still telling a story. There is still architecture to sound and there is still a path to follow beneath whatever music there is," says Jonathan Elias. "Directional sound is going to help the viewer or listener follow along; interactive sound can add a sense of description to each pathway you are following. We've done a lot of work in sound design, trailers and logo sounds; those are all short form sounds. This is just a natural out branch of our work, which is primarily commercial oriented. There is really no difference in formats.