Mumbai: Apple Music has made its new logo dance to its own tune, literally. The company played music through a tank of mineral oil, filmed the ripples it created and turned those movements into visuals for its rebrand.
Apple announced the rebrand Wednesday with a video called Made by Sound. British producer Fred again and NEST Acoustics created a short piece of music for the new design. Apple then used that piece to bring the logo to life.
“For the rebrand of Apple Music, we wanted sound to create the visuals. How do we take this idea of music and distill it into something visually beautiful?” the video explains.
Apple Music is changing its familiar red and pink app icon to black and white, fully rolling out next week. The font has changed too, with a thicker version of Apple’s SF Pro.
The new visuals will be used at the start of Apple Music videos, including concert footage and other original content. The branding will also be introduced across its marketing and the app.
Go behind the scenes of Made by Sound.
A story of music, collaboration and craft with @fredagainagain1 and NEST Acoustics. Discover how sound brought the Apple Music logo to life, captured entirely in camera. Just music, made visible. pic.twitter.com/ZyMRGdUVUX
— Apple Music (@AppleMusic) October 21, 2026
How they did it
The team built a special rig with a device called a transducer, which turns sound into vibrations. They played different notes through the rig to see how the liquid would react.
“We take a frequency and we play it through a rig. This rig then moves a large amount of liquid at the frequency of the notes,” the team said.
But not every note worked. Some made the liquid move so much that the logo was difficult to see. Higher notes were especially troublesome, so the musicians had to make changes to the tune. It took several months of experimenting before they were happy with the result.
For the shoot, they placed acrylic versions of the Apple Music logo and name inside a tank of mineral oil. They chose mineral oil because it was thick enough to make the ripples look like moving glass.
The finished music was played through the rig, and the team filmed the logo as the oil moved around it. The waves made it look as though the logo was bending and stretching, with flashes of colour appearing across it. No computer animation was used.