What does a product sound like?
Product sounds as brand assets

Every brand knows its logo and its colours. Few know what their products sound like. Yet people listen all the time while using them: the click of a lid, the sizzle in the pan, the crack of a chocolate shell. Research shows these sounds change perception, and some brands now make them heard on purpose.

1. Why the sound of a product matters

The best-known experiment comes from Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence. Participants bit into crisps and heard their own bite sound through headphones, sometimes unchanged, sometimes louder or with more treble. With the louder, brighter sound they rated the same crisps as crisper and fresher, without noticing the influence (Journal of Sensory Studies, 2004). The study won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2008.

Spence later called sound “the forgotten flavour sense” (Flavour, 2015). Three more studies point the same way:

• Cork or screwcap: in a test with 140 people, the same wine seemed better and more festive after a cork pop (Beverages, 2017).
• Music as seasoning: with low-pitched music, the same toffee tasted more bitter than with high-pitched music (Crisinel et al., 2012). Researchers call this sonic seasoning.
• Car doors: as early as 1995, an engineering paper found peak loudness to be the main factor in perceived quality when a door closes (SAE).

So sound sets expectations about freshness, quality and occasion, mostly without us noticing. There is no dedicated study on cookware yet. But anyone who has stood in a kitchen knows how the sizzle in a hot pan makes you hungry.

2. Brands that released their product sound

An album of a brand's own product sounds is rare. These cases are well documented:

What stands out: LEGO, Extra and Lidl sell their product sound as relaxation. Sounds Like Fissler takes a different route. The sounds show what the product sounds like at work, and they are meant as material for people's own videos.

Albums that package a brand melody are a different thing. In 2022 Mastercard released “Priceless”, ten songs that all contain the brand melody (Mastercard). That is sonic branding through music, not product sound.

3. Product sounds on social media

McDonald's Japan has opened up its product sound to creators most consistently. For “Fries Beat” (2024) the brand released the fryer alarm as an official free sample for the first time, alongside a music video and a music game on TikTok. The campaign won Gold and Silver at Spikes Asia 2024 (Spikes Asia). The agency reports higher fries sales for the follow-up campaign, though those are its own figures.

ASMR films in which the product sound takes the lead are far more common:

• Oddly IKEA (2017): 25 minutes of sounds from the back-to-college range. According to the agency, sales in that range rose by 27 percent (It's Nice That).
• Ritz Korea: a cracker is opened, broken and eaten, nothing else (The Drum).
• Michelob Ultra (Super Bowl 2019): Zoë Kravitz taps the bottle and lets the beer fizz into the glass (CNBC).

The difference from a release: an ASMR film runs once as a video. A released sound can turn up again and again under new videos, with the brand name next to it.

4. Sounds brands deliberately cultivate

Some brands turn a sound their product makes anyway into a signature over the years:

• Magnum: the crack of the chocolate shell is at the centre of the campaign “Nothing Cracks Like a Magnum”, in 2025 even played in sync on digital billboards (Adworld).
• Snapple: when the bottle moved from glass to plastic around 2018, the “pop” on opening had to survive (Packaging World).
• Mercedes-Benz: according to Bloomberg, the doors are engineered to sound the same across generations (Bloomberg).
• Porsche Taycan: the electric car's driving sound is built from real vehicle sounds, with unpleasant parts filtered out (Porsche). BMW took the other route with Hans Zimmer and had the sound composed (BMW Group).

5. Can a product sound be protected?

Sound marks are explicitly possible in Germany, including pure noises (DPMA). For product noises the bar is high, though. In 2021 the EU General Court refused a mark consisting of opening a drinks can and the fizz that follows: the sound was purely technical and would not be perceived as an indication of a brand (General Court, T-668/19). Harley-Davidson withdrew its US application for its engine sound in 2000 after competitors opposed it.

Designed, distinctive sounds have better chances, such as the Mac startup chime, which is registered in the US. In practice this means a product sound becomes a brand asset mainly because the brand shows it again and again and ties it to its name.

6. How a product sound gets into reels

For people to put a product sound under their video, it has to show up in the platform's audio picker. There are two routes:

1. Release through a music distributor: the sound comes out as a track on Spotify, Apple Music and others. Since 2021 many distributors also deliver to the Instagram and Facebook music library (Music Business Worldwide). Because Spotify only counts a stream after 30 seconds, the sounds should be longer than a short effect.
2. Your own original audio: the brand posts a video with the sound on its channel. Others can then reuse it via “Use audio”.

One important point: Instagram's music library is licensed for personal use. Business accounts often lack full access there and use Meta's Sound Collection instead. TikTok limits business accounts to its Commercial Music Library (TikTok). So the Spotify route mainly reaches private users and creators, exactly the people who cook and film at home. If you also want to reach companies, plan the route into the commercial libraries as well.

7. Example: Sounds Like Fissler

For Fissler we recorded the sound of the products on the video set in October 2024: the pressure cooker locking and letting off steam, pasta in boiling water, potatoes, steak and shrimps in the pan. In post-production we cleaned every recording, removed unwanted noise and brought the sounds to about a minute.

On 23 October 2024 two albums with 18 sounds each came out, “Sounds Like Fissler (DE)” and “Sounds like Fissler (EN)”, on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. The titles are what people search for, such as “Pan searing a steak”. On Spotify they have passed 10,000 streams, with the English album played most. How the project ran in detail and what the sounds sound like is in the case study Sounds Like Fissler.

If you want to work with the sound of your product, five questions help you get started:

• Which moments sound typical? Opening, locking, pouring, sizzling, cracking. Write a list before the shoot.
• Where do you record? On set the sounds match the picture, in the studio it is quieter. Often both are worth it.
• What are the sounds called? What people search for, in every language you offer them in.
• Who should use them? Private creators, your own team or other companies. That decides the route onto the platforms.
• Who owns the rights? Recording, editing and release should be settled in a contract before the first sound goes online.

Related reading:

• Case study: Sounds Like Fissler
• Sound design for brands and products
• Sound design for social media
• What is sonic branding?