You walk into a cafe, hear a single chime, and immediately know someone opened a Macbook. You sit through a trailer, and a few bars tell you which studio produced the movie, before you even see the logo. Sound is doing so much work behind the scenes that most of us never notice, until it isn’t doing it right. That is the sneaky power of sonic identity.
When I talked with Erwin de Boer, one thing kept coming up, simple and obvious, and yet ignored, “sounds are around us all the time.” They are feedback, cues, mood setters, and brand ambassadors, all at once. If you want a brand to be more than a logo, you need to understand how sound moves people, not just how it fills space.
There are three practical roles sound plays for brands, and they are useful to separate because each requires a different approach.
This is the sonic logo, the short anthem, the piece you hear and immediately associate with a brand. Think of the Pixar/Disney fanfare or the Intel chime. As Erwin said, “sound branding is simply just using sound to make, create a distinct brand, make your brand recognizable.” The brand score is the longer cousin of the sound logo, it is the musical DNA that everything else should reference.
Functional sound design
These are the tiny interaction sounds that tell you a thing happened, like the iPhone camera snap or keyboard clicks. They are not meant to be artistic statements, they are practical. As Erwin pointed out, “typing on the keyboard of your iPhone, it’s actually a very functional sound, because you know that you’re actually hitting a letter.” These sounds are UX, and they must be crisp and unobtrusive.
Behavioral or mood setting music
The mistake most brands make here, besides ignoring sound completely, is treating music as decoration. It is not wallpaper. It is a tool.
If you’re tempted to hand this off to an intern and play the radio, stop. There is a process, and it actually mirrors visual identity work.
Start with a conversation about brand personality. Ask the obvious questions, the ones many teams skip, like who are you, who are you speaking to, and what feeling should people have after interacting with your brand. Erwin explained it plainly, “If you know what the characteristics are of the brand, you know, what’s actually the feel of the brand, what’s the brand voice, what’s the, what do you want to communicate? Then a designer would make a logo out of it, and a composer would make a sound out of it.”
From there, you build a basic audio identity, a brand score that acts as the center point. Then you create variations, or mood packs, for different channels. You define usage rules in a style guide, explaining which piece goes where, how long it should be, and how loud it can be. That last bit matters more than marketers admit, because volume is not neutral.
I have a few pet peeves, and Erwin confirmed them. First, personal taste should not run your audio strategy. I know the temptation, you like a band, you want that band. It happens. Erwin called this out bluntly, musical taste can “stand in the way of making a decision that fits the brand.” Your CEO liking punk rock does not mean your bank should sound like a dive bar.
Second, volume and quality matter. Loud does not mean better, and as I said during the conversation, “loud doesn’t mean better.” If the music is loud and low quality you are not creating atmosphere, you are forcing people to leave. You can close your eyes if a space looks bad, you cannot close your ears and keep talking.
Third, licensing is a trap people stumble into mid sprint. A current hit song might seem like an instant shortcut to relevance, but licensing can be eye watering. We talked about examples where licensing a recognizable pop track for a single online ad can cost tens of thousands of euros. That may be worth it for a global campaign, but often you will get more mileage from original music you own, or a lesser known track that can become your sonic signature.
There is useful research on single musical variables, but as Erwin and I agreed, music is messy. Tempo, melody, timbre, pitch, instrumentation, cultural association, prior exposure, context, volume, room acoustics, and listener state all combine in ways that single variable studies struggle to capture. Erwin summed it up, “music is so changing, different, and actually a kind of a collection of thousands of little elements. And it’s very hard to isolate which element has which effect on emotions.”
So what would help brand practitioners is applied research that connects musical elements to behavioral outcomes in real settings. Not lab curiosities, but tests in stores, hospitals, airports, and apps with measurable KPIs, playlists compared, loudness varied, and audiences tracked. If we can get even directional rules that say, this tempo with this instrumentation increases dwell time by X percent in this demographic, that would change how brands plan audio.
Sound is not a luxury. It is a layer of identity and utility that either helps your brand tell a consistent story, or it quietly undermines everything else you worked on. If you are building a brand, think about the voice as carefully as the logo, and if you are already using music, audit it. Ask who it signals to, how it makes people move, and whether it actually belongs to the brand or to someone’s playlist.
If you do this well, people will notice less and feel better. If you do it badly, they will notice everything, loudly, and not in a good way.
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