It can relax you in the dentist's chair. It can bring tears to your eyes. It can bring up the remembered smell of burgers and fries at the drive-in. It can make you tap your foot. Only one sense can so powerfully affect all the others - hearing.

When the ear receives audio input, our reactions are often unconscious and largely predictable. In Seattle, Wash. a growing sound design company is using this knowledge of auditory cause and effect to enhance tradeshow exhibitry and permanent installations around the country.

Nike, Coca Cola, Motorola, Ericsson, Inc., Microsoft and a number of other companies, small and large, have found success using AUDISEE Sound and Music's audio environments.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles shaped up to be a showdown. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, the big-three video game companies, took over a huge portion of the south hall in the LA Convention Center. In this intense, head-to-head competition, every advantage counts. Nintendo turned to AUDISEE for the fifth consecutive year to help give its exhibit an edge.

"The use of sound and video to highlight the quality that Nintendo brings to the new level of game play was stupendous," Director of Product Development, Don James, said. "I think we won the competition of product showing and overall booth presentation."

Over the last five years, Nintendo's booth, produced by Ralph Miller Productions in San Francisco, has consistently been a draw for tradeshow visitors - from E3 to CES - and much of what distinguishes the booth from its competitors is how it uses sound.

"Nintendo creates a multi-sensory, multi-level, interactive environment at E3 '96," said the booth's executive producer, Ralph Miller. "Audio helps create environments which expand the architectural impression and provide atmospheres."

Part of creating atmosphere and ambience, at least AUDISEE's method, is to use multiple, hidden, lower-volume speakers to create a variety of "audio wallpapers" that virtually eliminate the cacophony of the surrounding show floor and encourage visitors to stay longer within the booth. AUDISEE creates carefully layered and mixed soundtracks to help keep people in the booth, rather than simply blasting music out of the booth, hoping it will serve as an attract medium.

"People commented that the overall environment at Nintendo's E3 booth was peaceful and that they liked being there, liked spending time there," Miller said. "Keeping people in the booth is the biggest advantage to using sound design."

AUDISEE President Peter B. Lewis said his company not only designs soundtracks, it produces the soundtrack, designs the system on which the soundtrack is played, provides the hardware for the sound system and installs the system at the show.

AUDISEE owns about 80 percent of the equipment needed to install intricate systems at tradeshows and takes care of renting the rest. "We handle a lot of the headaches for the client," Lewis said. "Our clients are assured of the best merge of software and hardware possible. It's a measure of convenience not many companies can provide."

"It goes beyond sound design. They (AUDISEE) do installations and then take that experience to the next place," said Miller, who works frequently with AUDISEE. "They know all the technical stuff and that keeps looping back on itself, creating a better and better product."