Your brand colors are documented in the brandbook down to the exact HEX value. Your logo has a defined clear space and minimum sizes. And your music? In most companies, music gets picked “by ear” — because someone on the team likes it, because it “fits the spot,” because it sounds like the last campaign. The most emotional channel your brand has runs with zero quality control.
Yet the emotions music evokes can be measured. Not metaphorically — literally: across nine dimensions, using a method developed by researchers in Geneva and adapted to the Polish market. Here's how that measurement works and what it means for your brand.
“Energetic and modern” — the brief you can't verify
Let's start with the problem. When a marketer commissions music for a campaign, the brief usually sounds the same: “energetic, modern, premium, but approachable.” Each of those words means something different to every person at the table. The composer hears “energy” as fast tempo. The brand manager thinks optimism. The board — gravitas and scale.
The result? The decision goes to whoever has the loudest voice in the room, not whoever is right. Revisions drag on for weeks because “something's still off,” but nobody can say what. And after the campaign, there's no way to check whether the music actually delivered on the strategy. No reference point means no accountability. Sound familiar? This scenario plays out in most organizations — regardless of industry or budget.
With color, this problem was solved long ago: nobody describes the company red with adjectives — they give you the exact value. You can do exactly the same with sound. All you need is a scale — one that measures emotions, not acoustic parameters. Because a brand doesn't buy decibels or tempo. A brand buys what the listener feels.
GEMS: nine dimensions instead of adjectives
That scale has existed since 2008. That's when Marcel Zentner, Didier Grandjean, and Klaus Scherer published the results of four studies on music-evoked emotions in the journal “Emotion.” More than 1,390 people took part. The outcome is the Geneva Emotional Music Scale — GEMS for short — the first model built specifically to measure musical emotions, rather than emotions in general.
That distinction is crucial. Music rarely triggers “pure” fear or anger, but it regularly evokes states that everyday emotion models fail to capture: wonder, nostalgia, a sense of uplift. So instead of borrowing a ready-made list of emotions from general psychology, the researchers tested large samples to find out what people actually feel when listening to music. Nine dimensions emerged from that data:
- wonder,
- transcendence,
- tenderness,
- nostalgia,
- peacefulness,
- power,
- joyful activation,
- tension,
- sadness.
Any track can be described as a profile across these nine axes. Listeners rate how strongly a piece evokes each of these states in them, and their responses produce a measurable emotional profile. “Energetic and modern” stops being a wish and becomes a hypothesis you can test: high joyful activation, high power, low tension. That's a spec you can verify, compare, and hold a brief accountable to.
Nine dimensions, four studies, more than 1,390 participants — that's how the first emotion measurement model built specifically for music came to be.
Can you trust this measurement?
The Polish adaptation: GEMSpl-E
Fair question. A scale built on Western European listeners might not fit Polish musical sensibilities. Emotions carry cultural context, after all — what sounds stirring to one audience may sound bombastic to another.
That's why the 2016 Polish adaptation of the tool is such an important reference point — developed by Maria Chełkowska-Zacharewicz and known as GEMSpl-E. The results are strong: the Polish version explains 73% of the variance in participants' responses, and scale reliability, measured by the alpha coefficient, exceeds 0.8. In plain terms: the tool measures what it's supposed to measure, and it does so consistently with Polish listeners too.
For a marketer, that means one thing: an emotional profile measured in Poland describes the reactions of a Polish audience, not a template carried over from another market. You can build decisions about communication aimed at Polish consumers on it.
How many listeners does a stable result take?
This is where the worry about scale and cost usually kicks in. If we're talking research, surely that means hundreds of respondents, panels, and weeks of work? It doesn't — and we know that from research too, not from a hunch.
In 2024, Strauss's team published the EMMA study, in which 517 people rated 364 music excerpts. The authors checked how many raters it takes before a track's averaged emotional profile stops changing meaningfully. The conclusion: as few as 10–20 raters yield stable estimates. Additional dozens of people refine the result only marginally.
As few as 10–20 raters are enough to obtain a stable emotional profile of a track.
That changes the economics of the entire process. An emotional audit of your brand's music doesn't require the budget of a full segmentation study. It requires a well-selected group of a dozen or so people and a rigorous method. Which means the measurement can be repeated: before choosing a track, after adapting it, with every new campaign.
Sonic Positioning Maps: turning measurement into a map
Measurement alone, though, is only half the journey. Numbers gain meaning when they have a reference point. A track's emotional profile says little until you set it against two things: what the brand wants to communicate, and how its competitive landscape sounds.
That's why, on the GEMS foundation, we at TADADAM built our proprietary Sonic Positioning Maps methodology. The principle is simple to describe: we plot the emotional profile of the brand's music on a map together with the brand's emotional archetype — what its strategy calls for — and the profiles of competitors' music. One map then shows three things at once: how the brand wants to sound, how it actually sounds, and how its category sounds.
We've applied this method in banking, FMCG, automotive, and IT, among others. The strategic foundation of this approach is documented in our case studies.
The detailed calculations, weights, and rules of the methodology are our know-how, so you won't find them in this article. What is public is the overarching principle: no decision about a brand's sound gets made “by ear.” Every single one is grounded in measured emotions and a position on the map.
The alignment audit: which tracks are lying about your brand
So what do you get in the end? A concrete answer to a question most brands never ask themselves: does our music say the same thing as our strategy?
The map shows it without mercy. Some tracks play in line with the brand's archetype — those are worth putting front and center. Some are neutral: they do no harm, but they build no distinctiveness either. And some misrepresent the brand, communicating emotions that contradict the strategy — tension, say, where the brand promises calm. Those tracks work against you with every single airing, and without measurement nobody catches them, because each one, taken on its own, “kind of fits.”
The same measurement works in the other direction, too — when creating new music. Instead of judging each new version on gut feel, you compare it against the target emotional profile. The brief stops being a list of adjectives and becomes a target you can close in on step by step, in a verifiable way.
Only with that knowledge does a conversation about brand music become a business conversation. Instead of “I like it — I don't like it,” the question becomes: does this track move us toward the position we want to own, or away from it? The map answers that head-on.
“A cool sound” is guesswork. A measured emotional profile is a decision. The difference between the two is the same as between “a nice red” and the color written into your brandbook.
Sources
- Zentner, M., Grandjean, D., Scherer, K. R. (2008), “Emotion” — Geneva Emotional Music Scale: a 9-dimension model of musical emotions, 4 studies, more than 1,390 participants in total.
- Chełkowska-Zacharewicz, M. (2016) — Polish adaptation GEMSpl-E: 73% of variance explained, reliability α > 0.8.
- Strauss et al. (2024), the EMMA study — 364 music excerpts rated by 517 people; 10–20 raters suffice for stable estimates.
- TADADAM — Sonic Positioning Maps: a proprietary sonic positioning methodology, applied in banking, FMCG, automotive, and IT, among others.
Want to know how your brand really sounds — and how it stacks up against the competition? Turn “a cool sound” into data. Let's talk about a Sonic Positioning Map for your brand.