“Make it catchy” – that line shows up in almost every sonic logo brief. It sounds reasonable, but it hides a trap. “Catchiness” doesn’t exist as a single property of sound. The science of musical memory distinguishes two separate memory processes – and a sound that wins at one usually loses at the other. Before you commission a sonic signature for your brand, it pays to know which memory you’re going after. Because one sound can’t hit both at once.
Two memories, one sound. The trade-off nobody mentions in pitch decks
Let’s start with a distinction that puts everything else in order. Recognition is when you hear a sound and know: “that’s them.” The stimulus comes from outside; your brain just matches it. Recall works the other way around – you can hum a melody from memory, with no prompt at all. In everyday language we call both “remembering.” For a sound designer, they are two different goals that demand different decisions.
The largest study of sonic signatures to date proved the point. The Silas team – a research consortium including Goldsmiths and the Max Planck Institute – tested 1,860 people on a set of 90 commercial sonic logos. Participants went through two tests. First: continuous recognition, i.e. picking familiar signatures out of a stream of sounds. Second: sung recall, i.e. humming the melody straight from memory.
The result is inconvenient for anyone who wants it all. Structural complexity improves recognition – and at the same time hurts recall. The simpler the melody, the easier it is to hum, but the harder it is to tell apart from dozens of similar ones. The richer the structure, the faster you’ll spot it in the noise – but you won’t be humming it in the shower.
Structural complexity in a sonic logo improves recognition but impairs recall from memory. The designer doesn’t choose whether the sound gets remembered. They choose how.
This trade-off won’t vanish with good intentions or a bigger budget. It’s a property of human memory, not a weakness of any particular agency. That’s why the first decision in a sonic logo project isn’t about the melody. It’s about the goal. The scale of the study matters here: with 1,860 participants and 90 real, commercial signatures, this is no anecdote. It’s the hardest evidence in the history of the discipline – and solid grounds to stop designing brand sound by gut feel.
The 5–6 note rule. Intel and McDonald’s didn’t land there by accident
So if you have to choose, where’s the sensible starting point? An older but still relevant 2012 study by Krishnan’s team provides the answer. The researchers tested how the length of a sonic signature affects consumers’ willingness to pay for a product. The conclusion: the optimum sits around 5–6 notes.
Too short, and the sound doesn’t carry enough information to build a brand association. Too long, and it stops being a signature and becomes a jingle – harder to repeat and more expensive to use consistently. Five or six notes is the zone where a sound is already distinctive yet still easy to process.
This is where theory meets market practice. Intel’s signature has 5 notes. McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” – also 5. Both brands sit squarely in the optimum from Krishnan’s study. And they’re not outliers: the world’s most iconic sonic logos run 5–6 notes and about 3 seconds. That’s not a fashion – it’s a repeatable pattern rooted in how auditory memory works.
The 5–6 note rule, however, only answers the question “how many.” It doesn’t answer “how” – and that’s exactly where the dilemma from the Silas study gets decided. The same 5 notes can be played dead simple on a single instrument or dressed in a dense, distinctive sonic texture. The note count stays the same. The memory effect – completely different.
When simplicity wins, and when complexity does
Simplicity wins when you want people to hum. A melody that can be replayed from memory starts living beyond the media you pay for. Customers repeat it on their own – in the kitchen, in the car, at their desk. “I’m Lovin’ It” is the textbook example: five notes so simple that half the world hums them. Every hum is free brand exposure and a deeper memory trace.
Complexity wins where the sound has to cut through noise and be recognized in a split second. A store, a shopping mall, a point of sale, a notification on a phone full of other notifications – in those conditions, nobody hums anything. Only one thing matters: does the customer instantly know it’s your brand and not a competitor’s. A richer structure gives the brain more hooks to match against – which is exactly why, as the Silas team showed, it improves recognition.
In brand practice, that means two different design scenarios:
- A brand built on broad-reach video and audio communication, one that wants to get into people’s heads and stay there – needs simplicity and bets on recall.
- A brand living in loud, competitive touchpoints – in retail, in the app, at the POS – needs distinctiveness and bets on recognition.
Most brands don’t fit cleanly into one scenario. They sell in noisy retail but build their image in video. They run an app full of notifications, but also spots meant to stick in people’s heads. And this is where it gets interesting.
The hybrid strategy: a simple core, a distinctive layer
Good news: the trade-off applies to a single sound, not to a brand’s entire sound system. Modern audio branding doesn’t design one audio file – it designs an architecture. And architecture lets you split the jobs across layers.
Keep the melodic core simple: 5–6 notes anyone can hum. That’s the part that works for recall and carries brand identity across channels. Build distinctiveness with the arrangement layer: instrumentation, timbre, sound design, texture. That layer can be dense and distinctive where the sound fights for recognition – and minimalist where it’s meant to stay out of the way.
One skeleton, many outfits. A customer who hummed the core after a spot will also recognize it in the app and at the parcel locker – even though the arrangement is different every time. Understood this way, a sonic logo stops being “the sound at the end of the ad” and becomes an identity system.
The question that settles the brief
Back to the brief we started with. Instead of “make it catchy,” ask yourself – and your agency – one question: do we want people to hum it, or to instantly know it’s us?
The first answer leads to simplicity and recall. The second – to distinctiveness and recognition. And if the answer is “both,” it means you’re not commissioning a sound – you’re commissioning a system: a simple core plus a designed arrangement layer, tailored to specific touchpoints.
Helper questions worth settling before the first note is written: where will this sound physically play – in a spot, in the app, on the hotline, at the point of sale? Which of those places are noisy and sonically competitive? Where does the customer have time and attention, and where only a split second? The answers set the balance between simplicity and complexity more precisely than any debate about taste.
The Silas study gives marketers something more valuable than a recipe: a decision framework. There is no single “good” sonic logo. There’s a sonic logo well matched to its goal – or badly. That difference doesn’t show up at the creative presentation. It shows up two years later, in your brand recognition data.
Sources
- Silas et al. (2026) – the largest study of sonic signatures to date: 1,860 participants, 90 commercial sonic logos, continuous recognition and sung recall tests; a research consortium including Goldsmiths and the Max Planck Institute.
- Krishnan et al. (2012) – a study of how sonic signature length affects consumers’ willingness to pay; optimum around 5–6 notes, right where Intel’s (5 notes) and McDonald’s (5 notes) signatures sit.
- TADADAM analysis – the most iconic sonic logos have 5–6 notes and last about 3 seconds.
At TADADAM we design sonic logos for a goal, not a trend – first we settle which memory your sound should target, and only then do we write the notes. If your brief is stuck on the word “catchy,” let’s talk – we’ll help you settle it.