What is a sonic audit?

A sonic audit is a systematic inventory of every sound a brand currently makes, and an honest assessment of it. Advertising music, films, the sonic logo if there is one, the phone system, app notifications, event music, retail and lobby sound, social content, podcasts, the ringtone on the sales team’s phones. The audit gathers all of it, asks what it says about the brand, whether any of it is consistent, and who actually owns it. It is the first phase of a serious sonic branding programme, because you cannot design a sound for a brand until you know what it sounds like today.

What the audit covers

• Inventory. Every audio asset in circulation, where it plays, how often, and who made it. Most brands are surprised by the number. A mid-sized company usually has dozens of pieces of music it has never heard side by side.
• Consistency. Do the pieces share anything? Tempo, mood, instrumentation, a motif? Or does each campaign sound like a different company?
• Distinctiveness. Would a listener know it was this brand with the logo covered? Could a competitor use the same track? Library music almost always fails this test, because a competitor often is using the same track.
• Fit. Does the sound match the brand’s written values and its visual identity? A warm, human brand with aggressive trailer music has a problem it can hear but has not named.
• Ownership and rights. What is bought out, what is licensed, which licences are expiring, and which pieces are being used outside their terms. This is where audits earn their fee. Unlicensed use is common and expensive.
• Technical state. Loudness, formats, and whether the only copy of the sonic logo is a low-quality rip from a video.
• Competitors. What the category sounds like, so the new identity can own a space nobody else occupies.

What comes out of it

A short report and a listening session. The report maps the touchpoints, scores each asset, lists the rights risks and ends with a recommendation: what to keep, what to retire, and what the new identity has to solve. The listening session is often the more persuasive of the two. Playing a brand’s last ten adverts back to back, in a room, is usually the moment the marketing team hears the problem for themselves.

A famous example

Before launching its sonic brand in 2019, Mastercard mapped the places it makes sound, from advertising and sponsorship to the payment terminal, so that one melody could be adapted coherently to each of them. The audit came before the composition, and the identity was designed against the real list of moments rather than an assumed one.

Audits from our studio

The discovery phase of every sonic identity we build does this work, whether or not the client calls it an audit. For Dubai Airports the list of moments ran from brand films to contact-centre holding lines and traveller-facing digital, and the identity was built to scale across that list rather than the brand film alone. For Expo 2020 Dubai, a world expo is hundreds of moments held together by one experience, from pavilions and ceremonies to broadcast and audio guides, and the sonic strategy had to account for all of them before a note was written.

The audit is also how we find out what a brand has already earned. Etisalat’s sonic identity, composed by our co-founder Joe Dickinson, ran on television, radio, hold lines, retail and brand films across the UAE from 2010 to 2020. An asset like that, with a decade of recognition behind it, is exactly what an audit exists to protect from being thrown away by accident.

When to commission one

Before a rebrand, obviously, and before any new sonic identity. But also before a media agency change, when campaigns start sounding inconsistent, when a licence renewal lands on someone’s desk and nobody knows what it covers, or when the brand is expanding into new markets and the music that worked at home needs to travel. An audit is cheap next to a campaign, and it is the fastest way to turn “our audio feels off” into a list of things to fix.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a sonic audit take?
A few weeks for most brands, most of which is collecting the assets. Large organisations with many markets and agencies take longer because the audio is spread across more people.

Can we do it ourselves?
You can do the inventory yourselves, and you should: it is the part that only you can do. The assessment benefits from an outside ear, because the people who commissioned the music are the least able to hear what is wrong with it.

Is an audit only for big brands?
No. Small brands often have the messiest audio because nobody has owned it. The audit is shorter, and the fix is usually faster.

What if the audit finds nothing worth keeping?
That is a useful result. It means the new identity starts clean, and it gives the brand a clear reason to retire everything else on launch day.

Related terms: touchpoint, sonic brand guidelines, hold music, buyout, sonic DNA. For the wider discipline, see sonic branding.