SONIC IDENTITYHow brands sound
Designing the complete sonic layer of a product or brand — and writing it down so it lasts.
Most brands don't decide how they sound. They accumulate it.
A sound gets made for a launch film. Someone grabs something from a library for the app. A year later there's a notification chime nobody chose, a UI set from a different vendor, and a campaign track that has nothing to do with any of it. Every piece was fine on its own. Together they don't add up to anything, because nobody was holding the whole picture.
A sonic identity is the opposite of that: one set of decisions about what the brand sounds like, made deliberately, applied across everything, and documented well enough that the team can keep building on it after I'm gone.
Every system is scoped to the product. Some brands need a mnemonic and a core set of sounds. Some need the whole surface — every interaction, the musical language, the film work, the haptics. The parts are the same either way.
The parts
Direction
A written treatment: what the brand should sound like and why, worked out with you before anything is produced.
Mnemonic (sonic logo)
The signature sound, in a full variant set — full, short, soft, notification-scale.
Interaction set
The sounds of the product itself, mapped to the moments that matter.
Musical language
Themes and beds for films, launches, and campaigns, built to extend.
Haptic design
Designed alongside the sound and the picture, so all three land on the same frame. Authored and handed to engineering, not left for them to guess.
Style guide
The document that makes all of it governable.
THE PART THAT OUTLIVES THE PROJECT
Sonic Style Guide
Brands have a visual brand book. Almost none of them have the sonic equivalent. So the sound drifts the moment someone new joins, or a vendor changes, or a feature ships on a deadline.
So I write one. It says why, not just what — which is the part that only survives if it comes from inside the work. That's what keeps your team, and whoever comes after me, coherent.
It's the sonic version of the document your design team already lives by:
• What the brand sounds like, and why, in language a designer can use
• The palette — tonality, instrumentation, texture, timing
• When sounds fire, how they layer, mix and platform specs, accessibility
• On-brand and off-brand, with audio examples of both
• How to make a new sound that still belongs
Systems I’ve built
DUOLINGO
Sonic Identity
Six years, built one sound at a time — the voice, the app, the campaigns.
SIMPLY
Product sound system
One identity across a family of apps, written down as a guide.
How it starts
Talking about music and sound is awkward. Everyone has words for what they want and none of them mean the same thing to two people. So I write it down first. How it should feel, where the sound is headed, what we're drawing from. It gives everyone a shared vocabulary, and it's the best place to disagree.
Then a couple of directions, produced properly enough to judge. You pick one. I build it out across the scope, write the guide, and sit down with your team so they can actually use it.
The system thinking and the sound aren't separate jobs to me.
After it ships
A system needs someone watching it. Features ship, teams change, and sound drifts faster than anything else in a brand because nobody can see it drifting.
For most clients I stay on in some form. New sounds for new features, a periodic look at how sound is actually being used in the product, and the musical language extended as campaigns come up. It's the difference between a system that holds and one that quietly stops being true.
Have something in mind?
If you're building a product's sound from scratch, or trying to make sense of one that grew sideways, I'd love to hear about it.