Sound Effects: Finland
Bespoke vs. AI. What 16 sonic logos tell us about the future of sonic branding.
The study is simple in shape. We showed people a brand's visual logo on its own, then the same logo with a sonic logo attached, and measured what changed. Eight brands had bespoke sonic logos made by composers. Eight had sonic logos generated by AI. Every number below is that difference.
How to read these: each figure is the change against the same brand heard with no sound at all. Higher is stronger.
Finnish brands tested — eight with bespoke sonic logos, eight paired with AI-generated ones.
Average emotional appeal lift over a no-sound baseline.
Memory encoding lift. Identical for both routes, and it improved for all 16 brands.
Median lift in how human the brand feels.
Rather than argue about sound, we decided to measure it.
Sound Effects: Finland is the third report in a research series testing how sonic branding performs in practice rather than in theory. Using Implicit Association Testing, we compared eight Finnish brands with established bespoke sonic logos against eight Finnish brands paired with AI-generated ones.
Each was measured against a no-sound baseline across three outcomes: emotional appeal, memory encoding, and how human the brand feels. The findings are not a verdict on AI. They are a map of where human judgment still does work AI cannot.
AI has earned a role, but not the reins.
AI-generated logos performed well but inconsistently. Half produced no brand impact, and one actively hurt the brand. Bespoke work was far more reliable.
Bespoke still has the human edge.
Bespoke logos produced a median lift in brand humanity nearly three times higher. AI can sound finished. Bespoke work is more likely to sound authored.
AI optimizes. Humans orchestrate.
AI-generated logos tended to win on one outcome at a time. Bespoke logos held several brand outcomes in balance at once.
Fit beats format.
Both routes produced standout winners and clear underperformers. What mattered was whether the sound fit the brand, not how it was made.
Memorability is not equity.
Sound is unusually good at being remembered — but memorability was unrelated to appeal. A sonic logo can become memorable without becoming meaningful.
Most sonic testing asks people to explain reactions they don't have access to. Implicit Association Testing measures the response instead — a rapid sorting task that captures what a sound does before anyone can rationalise it.
Every brand was tested twice: visual logo alone, then visual and sonic logo together. The difference is what the sound adds.
Sixteen consumer-facing Finnish brands, among them Marimekko, Fiskars, Finlayson, Elovena, Genelec, Artek and Finnair. Brand-level results are in the full report.
- Methodology
- Implicit Association Testing
- Brands
- 16 — 8 bespoke, 8 AI-generated
- Conditions
- Baseline vs. visual + sonic lockup
- Outcomes
- Emotional appeal, memory encoding, human vs. synthetic brand feel
- Significance
- 95% confidence interval
- AI platform
- ElevenLabs — licensed training data
- Series
- Third report — after Saudi Arabia and Italy
“What is left of your brand when people cannot see it?”
“Brands spend years refining what they look like. The moment the brand is heard instead of seen, they start improvising.”
Written by Joe Sauer of EmotiSphere Insights in collaboration with Tunement, with contributions from Herwig Kusatz of Sound Strategy))) and Dr. Caitlyn Trevor of SonicUXR.