The coolest part of Apple Music’s new identity is how unnecessary the elaborate physical process was.

Apple Music has a new visual identity built around an idea called Made by Sound.

The obvious way to execute it would have been digitally.

Instead, Apple Music, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Fred again.. and NEST Acoustics spent MONTHS working out how to make sound physically shape the visuals.

They broke an original composition into individual notes, played those frequencies through a transducer and used the resulting vibrations to disturb a shallow bath of mineral oil.

The video of the whole process is pretty neat.

Cameras then captured the real ripples, distortions and refractions.

Apparently, even that was super finicky.

Too many notes, or else frequencies that were too high, would agitate the oil enough to make the image unreadable.

Sound and image had to be tuned together until the physical effect finally worked.

The resulting footage became the raw material for Apple Music’s new animated mark, while the same composition turns into part of its sonic identity.

Apple describes the result as a physical record of the music rather than an illustration of it.

Very few brands would go to this much trouble today.

We can generate convincing liquid simulations, light refractions and sound-reactive graphics without getting a drop of mineral oil on anything.

But then there’d be no experiment to watch.

No odd rig, failed attempts, or Fred again.. turning music into moving liquid.

And, of course, that’d mean no making-of film for folks like me to share.

I wrote about the value of craft a few days ago. Well, THIS is the commercial value of craft now.

Digital tools and AI can whip up just about anything super fast.

Yet physical process gives us something more and more scarce: proof that somebody still gives enough Fs to make it the difficult way.

AND has enough bucks. 😉

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.