ThemeTech & the online room
CardCard 6 of 63
Questions5 to explore

Sound

Audio settings, use of sound effects & music

Bad audio ends remote sessions faster than bad video, and most participants do not know their setup is the problem.

Sound is the channel everything travels through. If participants cannot hear you clearly, they stop listening. If they are not sure whether they are muted, they go quiet. If background noise bleeds in from someone's environment, the group fragments. Sorting audio before the session is not an optional nice-to-have.

Sound can also be used deliberately: a soft ambient sound during working time, a short audio cue to signal a transition, or music during a break. These are small tools, but they help replace the texture that is missing when there is no shared physical space.

Online, specificallyIn a room, sound is ambient and shared; online, each person manages their own audio setup independently, so problems are invisible until they are already disrupting the session.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Test before, not during

Good facilitators run a sound check with the co-facilitator or early arrivals before the session opens, not after the group has assembled and is waiting.

Set mute defaults clearly

They open the session with a clear instruction: everyone muted by default unless speaking, unmute by pressing the spacebar (on most platforms), and they model it themselves consistently.

Use ambient sound deliberately

For long working stretches, experienced facilitators sometimes play a gentle looped track through their own audio, which signals focus time and fills the silence that some participants find uncomfortable.

Name audio problems fast

When audio issues appear (echo, a noisy background, someone's mic cutting out), they address it within thirty seconds, name the person directly and privately first where possible, and do not let the problem accumulate.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Have you tested your own audio setup and confirmed participants can hear you clearly?
What is the muting protocol and how will you communicate it at the start?
How will you handle a participant whose background noise is disrupting the group?
Are there moments in the session where sound (music, ambient audio) could help mark transitions or working time?
What will you do if your own audio fails mid-session?

What trips people up online

Echo is almost always caused by a participant using laptop speakers while their microphone picks up the room; the participant usually cannot hear it themselves.
Asking the whole group if they can hear you gets a slow, unreliable answer; a direct chat poll ('type 1 if audio is clear') is faster and surfaces problems better.
Music played through a video platform can trigger automatic noise suppression, cutting it out entirely; test music delivery the same way you will use it live.