Further Goals Based on This Project

Creating this video project has been a pivotal moment in my artistic practice and conceptual development, particularly in relation to the intersection of sound, branding, and cultural identity. By juxtaposing corporate audio branding—specifically the KFC jingle—with imagery drawn from Tanzanian food culture and post-industrial visual treatments, I began to understand how sound can operate not just as atmosphere or identity, but as a tool of control, seduction, and erasure.

Through this work, I realized that audio branding is far more than a sonic logo; it is a carefully engineered affective strategy that shapes perception, emotion, and even cultural memory. The irony and tension I created in the video—by setting polished, cheerful audio against muted, industrial visuals and traditional food preparation—revealed how sound can flatten local narratives, replacing them with global corporate aesthetics.

This project opened up new possibilities for me in terms of editing and compositional strategies. I intend to continue developing works that combine documentary material, corporate media fragments, and experimental sound design, using irony and visual disruption as tools to reframe familiar sounds and symbols. I’m especially interested in making sound and image misalign deliberately, to reveal the ideologies embedded within them.

Being in Arusha, Tanzania, during the making of this video showed me how important context and location are when working with sound. In the future, I would like to engage more directly with local soundscapes—street sounds, traditional music, oral storytelling—as a counterbalance to globalized brand sound. My goal is to highlight the tension between imposed sonic systems and grassroots audio cultures.

I also add some Tanzanian local food, local people and others’ clips into KFC in the video, WHY?

Placing Tanzanian food scenes alongside KFC scenes highlights the deep cultural and material differences between local and corporate food practices:

• Local food involves care, time, community, and tradition—often prepared by hand, using natural ingredients.
• KFC food represents speed, standardisation, and commercial efficiency—a highly processed, franchised product optimised for global uniformity.

This juxtaposition exposes not only economic inequality, but also epistemological conflict: two very different ways of knowing, valuing, and engaging with food.

From an audio branding perspective, these edits act as visual dissonance to the smooth, polished sound world of the KFC brand. The KFC audio motifs are designed to evoke comfort, appetite, and familiarity. But when they’re overlaid with sudden shots of earthy, smoky, hand-prepared Tanzanian meals, the brand sound becomes inappropriate, even absurd.

This editing choice breaks the illusion created by the audio branding: that this food is neutral, global, and culturally unproblematic.

I made this video into less vibrant – green style, which make the food looks like poisoned and a bit similar to roberty – industrial vibe. What’s the point of it? Why is it related to the audio branding? What am I wanna talking about in that way? Why did I add the monkey at beginning?

A key design element in the video is its desaturated green-toned color palette, which evokes a sterile, almost toxic or artificial atmosphere. This visual treatment was deliberately chosen to distort the typical sensory appeal found in food advertising. Instead of using high-saturation imagery that emphasizes freshness, abundance, and desire—hallmarks of corporate food visuals—this video subverts that expectation by making the food appear unappetizing, processed, and even dangerous.

Opening with the Monkey (Metaphor)
The video opens with a shot of a monkey—a symbolic gesture that can be interpreted as a metaphor for human imitation, absurdity. This sets a tone of critical distance and playfulness. The monkey becomes a subtle reference to the way global systems observe, mimic, and often exploit local cultures while remaining detached.

I want to convey this perspective. We observe the monkeys who are living in the wild as if they were animals in a zoo, but no one knows who the monkeys are actually.

Visual Aesthetic & Editing Analysis

• Poisoned Consumption:
  By draining warmth from the colour of the food, the visuals symbolically suggest that what’s being consumed isn’t nourishment, but something toxic—culturally, economically, and physically. It critiques the industrial food system promoted by global brands like KFC, where food is detached from its cultural and nutritional roots and repackaged as a commercial product.
• Robo-Industrial Aesthetic:
  The greenish, metallic tone echoes the colour schemes of factory interiors, fluorescent lighting, and industrial surveillance footage. This gives the video a robotic, systematised, dehumanised feeling, aligning with the mechanised soundscape of KFC’s audio branding. The editing rhythm also enhances this: tight cuts, repetitive visual cycles, and alignment with branded jingles suggest an automated process that lacks the human, communal, and sensory richness of traditional food practices.
• Visual-Audio Dissonance:
  This stylistic choice amplifies the contrast between the visual and sonic elements. KFC’s upbeat, clean, and polished audio branding is made to feel hollow or even eerie when placed over these muted, “contaminated” images. Instead of reinforcing appetite or comfort, the branded sounds become ironic—disconnected from the grim visual tone, exposing the artificial optimism baked into audio branding strategies.
• Critique of Global Branding Logic:
  The video, through its colour grade, rejects the polished global branding logic that aims to create uniformity across cultures. Fast food chains like KFC rely heavily on both visual and audio branding to build environments that feel the same in New York, London, or Arusha. By intentionally disrupting this visual harmony and creating a surreal, almost sickly tone, your video resists the illusion of comfort and sameness. It emphasises the unnaturalness of this global aesthetic, especially when it’s forcibly applied to contexts like Tanzania.
• Media Poison as Conceptual Strategy:
  There’s also an underlying commentary on the psychological and cultural effects of media saturation. The green hue becomes a metaphor for the contamination of perception—how repetitive corporate imagery and sound branding can dull critical awareness and aesthetic diversity, replacing local expressions with homogenised, branded experience.

About Audio Branding?

The visual approach, which is desaturated and “poisoned,” is directly linked to the fundamental criticism of audio branding as a means of sensory manipulation. While sound in advertising usually serves to amplify pleasure, trust, and desirability, this project uncovers the disjunction between sound and meaning—illustrating how a cheerful jingle can obscure damaging truths.

I reinterpret the meaning of the audio: the KFC jingle now feels mechanical and ironic rather than comforting.

I reveal how sound can be turned into a weapon — utilised to mitigate or obliterate harsh realities regarding labor, inequality, or cultural degradation. My proposition is that audio branding serves not only as an aesthetic element but also as a means of ideological control. It functions alongside visual branding to produce a misleading sensory coherence.

original videos

This video project emerged from my broader research into audio branding and its cultural implications, particularly within non-Western contexts. My goal was to investigate how corporate sound design—specifically the iconic audio branding of KFC—interacts with and disrupts local sonic and visual cultures, using irony, contrast, and collage as key strategies.

The process began during my time in Arusha, Tanzania, where I observed the real-life presence of KFC as a global brand embedded within a local economy.

As I heard the CISA’s creative project, this idea came out from my brain: I want to make a experimental video of KFC and focusing on the audio branding.

In the editing process, I intentionally crafted a strong contrast between the slick, upbeat sound of KFC’s audio branding and the raw, grounded imagery of Tanzanian food practices. I opened the video with a shot of a monkey, acting as a surreal and ironic metaphor—possibly representing outsider observation, mimicry, or primal consumption—and layered it with KFC’s cheerful jingle to immediately create tension and disorientation.

A key visual decision was to desaturate the color palette, giving the footage a muted green, almost toxic tone, which evoked a post-industrial, artificial aesthetic. This made the KFC food appear lifeless or even “poisoned,” in contrast to the vibrancy and care found in local cooking. The aim was to visually undermine the appetizing intent of corporate branding and reflect on how branding distorts reality, especially when detached from local context.

Sonically, I created a layered mix of KFC audio branding and traditional African music, allowing them to clash and bleed into each other. This hybridized soundscape questioned the dominance of global brand identity over indigenous sound worlds. I also edited in local food clips into KFC cooking scenes, deliberately disrupting the coherence of the branded narrative and suggesting a cultural contamination or resistance—a visual way to expose the tensions between global corporate identity and local cultural practice.

The project became both a critique and a provocation—questioning the role of audio branding as a form of soft power, and exploring how sound and image can be used to expose invisible systems of influence embedded within global commerce.

This video project critically explores the role of audio branding in shaping cultural narratives and global hierarchies through sound. By creating an ironic KFC advertisement using a mixture of branded audio, symbolic imagery, and contrasting food preparation scenes, the work questions how multinational brands embed themselves sonically and visually in post-colonial contexts. Filmed in Arusha, Tanzania—where a real KFC outlet operates—the video situates its critique within a specific local environment while referencing broader global issues.

Rooted in my research on audio branding, this work investigates how sound design in corporate identity (such as jingles, tonal motifs, and rhythmic cadences) reinforces not only brand recognition but also implicit values like speed, convenience, modernity, and aspirational consumption. In the case of KFC, these sonic tools are used to construct a comforting and familiar world of fast food culture that deliberately masks the inequalities it is built on—economic disparity, cultural displacement, and environmental impact.

By recontextualizing KFC’s branded sound within Tanzanian daily life, the video intentionally disrupts its intended function. Through ironic audio-visual contrast, the project critiques how these branding strategies overwrite local realities.

Tom Sachs – Consumer Culture and DIY Branding Aesthetics

Tom Sachs is known for recreating high-end branded objects (like McDonald’s, Chanel, NASA) using crude, handmade methods—deconstructing their perfection and exposing their constructed mythology. His installations often include sound elements, whether it’s the audio of a faux-McDonald’s kitchen or the background hum of industrial tools, creating an immersive brand-space gone wrong.

Sachs’s work shares my interest in de-fetishizing branding, turning clean corporate environments into messy, ironic, critical zones.

His tactile rebranding techniques parallel my sonic rebranding—where I remix KFC’s audio to clash with Tanzanian visuals.

Sachs also critiques how brands infiltrate identity and aspiration, something my video exposes through the contrast between fast food sound design and real-life local conditions.

Jake and Dinos Chapman – McDonald’s–Themed Sculptural Works

While the Chapman brothers’ work focuses primarily on visual iconography, their use of McDonald’s imagery speaks to the pervasive branding of culture, where logos and corporate symbols become religious, political, or philosophical objects. Though not strictly sonic, their work implies that branding operates across all sensory registers—visual, tactile, and by extension, auditory.

The Chapmans use dark irony and cultural corruption to critique capitalism—methods you employ in your video through visual metaphor (like the monkey in my video) and ironic sound layering.

Their art reveals how brand symbols mask violence and control, which connects to your theme of how KFC’s jingle masks inequality and local erasure.

They invite the audience to reconsider familiar icons, which mirrors your remixing of branded sound into an unsettling context.

McDonald’s: Meant to Be Classic by DDB Athens

This advertisement serves as a poignant illustration of modern audio branding at work.

It takes the legendary “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle—possibly one of the most well-known sonic logos in the world—and reinterprets it from a classical music perspective, transforming it into a classic orchestral motif. This illustrates the flexibility, cultural nature, and deep manipulativeness of sound design, which can recode brand identity across generations and geographies.

It highlighted the emotional power and adaptability of branded sound, which I echoed by reusing KFC’s branded audio out of context.

The orchestral twist in the ad shows how audio branding works across cultural codes, which parallels your use of African music against the KFC soundscape.

My ironic video takes this polished manipulation and deconstructs it, revealing the ideological force behind those same audio tactics.

Audio Branding

Michael Bull contends that, given the predominance of visual epistemologies in urban experience, it is unsurprising that the first consumer cultural icon of the twenty-first century is the Apple iPod, a sound-based technology. This book examines how we utilize sound to shape crucial aspects of our everyday lives, using the Apple iPod as an example. The author contends that the Apple iPod serves as an urban Sherpa for many users, aligning itself with the mobile array of technologies we routinely use in our daily lives.

The book illustrates the transformation of urban spaces occurring right before our ears, due to our use of mobile devices that are primarily sound-based.

Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, Michael Bull

Sound as a Luxury Product

• Audiophile Culture & Exclusivity: The fetishization of high-end gear (vinyl, tube amps, lossless audio).
• Spatial Audio & Immersive Experiences: Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos vs. experimental sound art installations.
• Sound Sculptures as Status Symbols: Artists like Harry Bertoia or Pan Sonic creating sound objects for elite collectors.

‘Holly+’, Holly Herndon

Holly Herndon Launches DAO-Controlled Vocal Deepfake Platform ‘Holly+’, an online instrument that channels audio files through a digital model of her own voice.

Upload a file, and a glitched-out version of Herndon will sing it back to you. In a statement, Herndon has described the project as a kind of vocal deepfake.

‘Bourdieu’s Distinction’, Pierre Bourdieu

In the course of everyday life we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions – that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes.

The Absurd & Satirical Sound Art

• Anti-Functional Sound