Apple Music Built Its New Visual Identity From Sound, With Fred Again Behind the Motif

Apple Music has a new visual identity, and it was made with liquid. In an explainer video for the rebrand, the creative team, working with Nest Acoustics, set out to answer a question they posed themselves: how do you take music and distill it into something visually beautiful? The answer was to build what they call “the perfect sound wave” and let it generate the look.

The method was physical. A frequency is played through a rig, and the rig moves a large volume of liquid at the pitch of the notes. What ends up on screen was captured from that movement rather than designed in software. The musical motif behind the final mnemonic came from Fred Again, who does not appear in the video himself.

That places him in a lineage he has never hidden. His mentor Brian Eno wrote the Windows 95 startup sound, one of the few pieces of music most of the world can hum without knowing where it came from. Eno later admitted he made it on a Mac. Fred Again now joins a smaller club of artists lending their ear to technology companies, though his contribution here is structural rather than performative.

There is also a contrast worth naming. Apple’s last widely discussed music-adjacent gesture was the 2024 iPad Pro ad in which instruments and a mixing desk were flattened by a hydraulic press. The company apologised and pulled it. A year later, the same brand is showing instruments of a different kind: a frequency, a tank of liquid, and a camera.