The Heartbeat Is Dead. Long Live the Heartbeat
Why sonic branding's most overused cliché keeps coming back, and why it needs to stop.
When the International Olympic Committee unveiled its first-ever sonic logo recently, it joined a growing and rather crowded club. The heartbeat. Again. And this time, they brought the world's most recognisable set of rings with them.
It's a symptom of a much deeper problem in sonic branding. And it's time we talked about it.
The Seduction of the Obvious
It's not hard to understand why brands reach for the heartbeat. It is, without question, one of the most psychologically potent sounds in existence. It's the first sound any human being ever hears, processed in utero before the brain has even finished forming. Research on familiarity and emotional engagement confirms that familiar sounds generate significantly more activity in the brain's limbic and reward circuits than unfamiliar ones. A heartbeat isn't just familiar, it's primal.
Layer on the science of entrainment, the physiological phenomenon where external rhythms synchronise with internal biological processes, and you have a sound that doesn't just reference an emotional state, it can induce one. A sonic logo pulsing at resting heart rate (60-80 BPM) can quite literally slow you down. Used at an elevated tempo, it can generate arousal and anticipation. This is powerful stuff.
So yes, the heartbeat works. The question is: for whom?
A Cliché Is a Cliché, No Matter How Good the Story
Here's the list of brands I am aware of that are currently using a heartbeat within their sonic logos: Audi, GSK, iHeartMedia, Nissan, Medibank, Roche, Snapdragon, and now, the Olympics. (I am sure there are others, so please let me know if I missed some.)
That's not a sonic strategy. That's a genre.
The 2024 Best Audio Brands report put it plainly: brands should steer clear of "easy icon-based sounds" and instead pursue "strong symbolic sonic assets." The heartbeat is the definition of an icon-based sound. It's literal, it's universal, and therein lies the fatal flaw. A sound that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. You cannot own the human heartbeat. You can only hope nobody notices you're sharing it.
Snapdragon found this out the hard way. When they launched a sonic logo built around heartbeats and clicks, industry analysts noted that the inability to own a generic human sound left the brand at "a sonic crossroads," risking sounding generically "human" rather than distinctively Snapdragon. GSK has been flagged in multiple industry reports for relying on a heartbeat sonic that lacks distinctiveness. iHeartMedia's drum-mimicking-a-heartbeat has been called a "common industry cliché".
And yet the list keeps growing.
The Audi Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Among this crowded field, Audi stands out as the rare brand that has made the heartbeat genuinely work. Through years of consistent, contextually appropriate deployment across a premium automotive identity, Audi has built real recognition around its heartbeat-based acoustic trademark. It is, within those specific parameters, ownable through sheer force of repetition and context.
But Audi's success has arguably made the problem worse. It has given other brands permission to believe that the heartbeat is a viable shortcut to emotional resonance, without doing the work that made it ownable for Audi in the first place. The result is a sonic landscape where the same fundamental pulse is being used to represent a luxury car brand, a pharmaceutical company, a tech chip, and now the Olympic Games.
Industry voices have noted that context and congruence do "most of the heavy lifting" in distinguishing similar sonic executions. And that's partially true. These brands do live in different mindspaces. But sonic branding does not operate purely in the conscious mind, and the subconscious does not neatly sort its associative filing by industry sector. When enough brands occupy the same sonic territory, the territory stops belonging to any of them.
The Story Is Not the Sound
The brands that reach for the heartbeat rarely do so lazily. In almost every case, there is a compelling narrative behind the choice. It represents life. It represents humanity. It represents the shared physical experience of being present for something meaningful. These are not bad ideas. Some of them are genuinely insightful.
But here's the uncomfortable truth about sonic branding: the story of how a sound was made, or why it was chosen, is not the same as the sound itself. When a sonic logo plays in a stadium, on a screen, or through a speaker, no one is reading the rationale document. They hear a pulse. A rhythm. A heartbeat. And increasingly, they've heard it before.
Research on sonic logo design is unambiguous on one point: melody-based sonic assets dramatically outperform simple rhythmic or tonal ones in terms of recall and brand association. Melodic logos score higher on recall, appeal, and brand linkage across virtually every available study. A standalone heartbeat, however meaningful the concept behind it, is rhythmic, not melodic. It is, by design research standards, structurally limited in its capacity to build long-term brand equity through recall alone.
The concept can be brilliant. The execution still has to do the work.
What The Industry Keeps Getting Wrong
The heartbeat could serve as a rhythmic foundation, the pulse beneath something melodically distinctive, texturally complex, and ownable. A heartbeat as a substructure is a defensible creative choice, and there is genuine precedent for brands using primal sonic cues as the backbone of a broader, more developed identity. But that requires the creative courage to build upward from the foundation rather than handing it in as the finished work.
Too often, the heartbeat is not the beginning of a sonic identity. It is the entirety of one. And that is where the strategy collapses. The emotional power of the sound gets mistaken for distinctiveness, when in reality it is doing precisely the opposite: connecting the brand to a universal human experience that every competitor in the space can claim equally.
A heartbeat as a substructure is a defensible creative choice. A heartbeat as the whole answer is a missed opportunity, regardless of the size of the brief.
The Broader Reckoning
Sonic branding is a discipline with genuine scientific depth, extraordinary creative potential, and a growing body of evidence for its commercial impact. It deserves better than this.
The heartbeat is not inherently bad. It is powerful, primal, and emotionally resonant. But power without distinctiveness is just noise. And right now, the sonic branding world is producing a lot of very expensive, very emotionally compelling noise that all sounds the same.
The next brand that considers reaching for a heartbeat should ask themselves one simple question: if Audi already owns this territory, what exactly are we building?
Because if the answer is "a heartbeat, but with a really good story behind it," you might want to go back to the brief.
