Wikipedia has a new sound logo, one that the Wikimedia Foundation hopes will define its brand as people increasingly use voice and speech instead of screens for accessing its information on phones, tablets, and smart speakers.
Created by Thaddeus Osborne—a Virginia-based nuclear engineer who produces music for fun in his spare time—it was picked from among thousands of entries to the foundation’s open contest in search of the audio embodiment of the idea of “knowledge growing.” Osborne’s creation mixes a crescendo of flipping book pages, keyboard clicks, and a short chime, which results in a new audio mark that feels instantly likable.
That’s important because, as Mathoto Matsetela-Hartmann, senior manager of global brand at the Wikimedia Foundation, tells me over email, we may start to hear it quite often. The sound logo will be used to identify Wikipedia and Wikimedia as the sources of any information spoken by voice-assistant searches on every device imaginable. It will be heard anywhere Wikimedia content appears. “The audio logo will become part of the branding on audio and visual content from and licensed by Wikimedia across video, TV, film, podcasts, and events,” Matsetela-Hartmann says.
The push for an audio logo comes at an important time. “We know that active voice-assistant users have increased at an exponential rate,” she says, “so much so that currently, 27% of the world’s online population use voice search on their mobile devices, and many more use nonmobile voice assistants via smart speakers.” People are increasingly using Wikipedia and Wikimedia content to answer general knowledge queries on these devices, so creating a sound logo that clearly associates that information with the foundation’s projects is fundamental “to reassure listeners accessing Wikipedia content indirectly, that the information that they are getting is accurate, reliable, and verified by thousands of volunteers of the Wikimedia movement.”
Audio logos are short and distinctive sound sequences, positioned at the beginning or ending of audio or audiovisual content, and they have been an important branding tool for decades now. As consumers, we may not consciously register them, but their strong recall power is undeniable. Think about the NBC three-tone signature, the first audio trademark ever to be registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in use since 1929. Or Netflix’s simple “tu-dum,” designed by Oscar-winning sound editor Lon Bender. And who doesn’t associate this five-note composition created by Walter Werzova with Intel? Or the McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle, Nokia’s ringtone, THX, or even MGM’s Lion: These universally known sounds and hundreds others are seared into our brains, associated with their respective brands.
In a world where billions access information using audio on a daily basis, the sound logo is becoming more important than ever, which is why sound-design companies are on the rise, like New York-based Audiobrain, which developed the audio logo for Microsoft’s Xbox 360. However, the Wikipedia Foundation didn’t turn to those companies, but to its members. “Most organizations wanting to create a sound logo would probably hire an award-winning agency or Grammy-winning producer,” Matsetela-Hartmann says. “But the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia Foundation operate, in some respects, the same way our projects are built: in the open, globally inclusive, and using participatory principles.”
A product of the Wiki spirit
To come up with its sound logo, the foundation launched a competition called the Sound of All Human Knowledge. Over the course of a month last fall, it received 3,235 anonymized submissions from 2,094 participants in 135 countries. These submissions, Matsetela-Hartmann says, were then scored through multiple rounds by professional audio producers and sound experts from the MassiveMusic global network. The filtering continued in a selection committee comprising Wikimedia community members and sound professionals, which scored the top 40 submissions to select a top 10—the finalists for whom the entire community voted.
Osborne isn’t a professional audio engineer or musician, he tells me over email. “It’s my passion,” he says. “I was able to transfer a good amount of the knowledge and self-discipline I gained from my schooling into learning audio-production techniques and signal processing, but ultimately it is my curiosity about the world around us that drives me to learn and create.”
His winning audio logo—which he created in about four hours—is composed of the sounds of book pages turning, keyboard clicks, and a synthesizer chime. “My ultimate goal was to evoke a sense of curiosity and drive to learn, akin to the feeling one gets when answering a trivia question, hence the call and response nature of the sound logo,” Osborne tells me. “In my view, the Wikimedia movement is all about promoting the free exchange of knowledge. When I received the creative brief, I was most drawn to the prompt “knowledge growing,” which I used as my primary inspiration to guide my compositional decisions.”
For Osborne, the best way to convey knowledge was the sound of a book, so he recorded several takes of himself thumbing through pages until he got exactly what he wanted, which he laid over a crescendo of keyboard clicks and other library-like sounds. He claims he wanted to give it a sense of growth and scale to the large body of information that Wikimedia represents. “After the initial crescendo, I added a short musical phrase to resemble the rhythm someone might sing “Wi-ki-me-di-a” to.”
Matsetela-Hartmann tells me not to expect to listen to the new audio logo anytime soon, though. First, she says, Osborne will record it again in a professional sound studio to obtain the maximum quality possible. After that, they will work with third parties to put it where needed, so Alexa can sing “Wi-ki-me-di-a!” when you ask her if a platypus can really make its own custard.
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