CASE STUDYSimply
A sound system, written down.
Sonic Identity · In-app soundA piano app can’t use a piano.
For years Simply taught millions of people piano. As it grew into a family of apps — guitar, singing, drawing — it needed one sonic identity flexible enough to live across all of them. The catch: in a product that teaches instruments, any recognisable instrument in the interface becomes a bug. The guitar that feels right in Simply Guitar is wrong in Simply Piano. The sound had to belong to the brand without belonging to any instrument a learner might be studying.
PART ONE
Sonic Logo
ElementsTwo seconds that had to feel joyful and supportive and carry the whole arc of learning something — start, plateau, payoff. The melody at the centre wasn't new; it was an existing Simply melody people already knew, and recognising it was the right one was half the job. The other half took months: instrumentation, rhythm, and a structure built around the melody in three parts.
IGNITION
The start
initial excitement and motivation of the Learner’s Journey.
Guitar strum, marimba cord glissando
MELODY
The Learner’s Journey
Tonal representation of the ups and downs, the gains and step backs of the learning journey.
Up, down before the final note
SPARK
Simply’s essence
The final note and lingering feeling. It is the guiding north star that embodies the Simply essence of being a warm, friendly, positive, and happy guide with a bit of a magical touch.
I transposed it to C major and kept it pentatonic. Pentatonic means the same notes can be reharmonized into a different mood without becoming a different melody — so the logo can be warm, or triumphant, or quiet, and still be recognizably itself.
The product sounds inherit the logo's instruments, but they needed a voice of their own — something that could fire fifty times a lesson without wearing out. So I built an instrument that doesn't exist. Acoustic marimba, a staccato FM synth, and a pop layer — playing the same notes, or an octave apart, and never alone. The rule isn't secrecy. It's that any of them on its own is instantly recognisable as itself, and the moment a learner recognises an instrument, the sound belongs to that instrument instead of to Simply.
PART TWO
In-app sound suite
Marimba
FM Synth Pop
Pop
Simply Pop
Three layers, functioning as one. The timbre belongs to Simply — to no instrument, and no genre a learner might already know.
WHAT GOT BUILT FROM IT
Every sound in the family comes out of that one voice, and they all share a grammar: Simply Pop only ever ascends, building anticipation, and a celeste marks the arrival at the top of the scale. Anticipation, then payoff. That's the sentence every sound is speaking.
The star sounds are the clearest case — one system, with levels.
Journey Item Complete
The Simply Pop ascending, a reverse marimba pulling the anticipation up, then the celeste landing the payoff.
Course Complete
The ceiling. The highest moment in the app, so it's the full band — everything the palette has, at once.
And the stars, where the system shows its levels — one, two, three, each building on the last.
One Star
Two Stars
Three Stars
One star is a celebration too. Every count had to feel like an achievement — and the fail sound is an alert, never a disappointment.
Fail
FunctionLearner misses a section and needs to go back.
Emotion“Let's try that again.” A neutral alert. Never frustration.
InformationThat section wasn't right.
BehaviorKeep going, undiscouraged.
AttributesRelated to the checkmark sound, but shorter. Short articulation reads as an alert; long articulation reads as disappointment.
WRITTEN DOWN
Every sound gets the same four questions: what it does, what it should make a learner feel, what it should tell them, and what it should make them do next. Then the instruments that deliver it.
Checkmark
FunctionLearner finishes a section. Keep going.
EmotionAccomplishment, but not arrival.
InformationThat section is done.
BehaviorContinue.
AttributesFires constantly, in an app where someone is trying to play music — tonal elements needed to be short. And it can't be guitar or piano, or it belongs to one product instead of all of them.
Most of what makes these work is invisible and easy to lose. An alert versus a disappointment is milliseconds or instrument choice — the kind of decision that evaporates the moment someone new makes a sound without knowing why the old ones worked.
So the guide isn't a record of what I made; it's the reasoning underneath. Including how to add to it: a new product can have its own logo, as long as Ignition, Melody and Spark survive, the key holds, and the length doesn't move. Change the instruments, keep the bones.
That's the difference between a set of sounds and a system. The sounds, I could hand over. The system keeps working after I'm gone.
One voice, across a whole family of products — built to be handed off.