- Imagine standing there minding your own business,
and entirely without warning,
something smacks right into you at Mach 1,
that's the speed of sound,
and you're still able to survive,
maybe a little teary-eyed, especially if you are hit
by the words from your child saying they love you.
See what I did there?
Sound hits us at 761 miles per hour
every moment of our lives,
yet those crucial sound waves are invisible to us
until we give them that second thought.
A sound wave can surface an emotion or memory
from the deepest part of our being.
It can wake our minds and our hearts.
It can communicate, educate, aggravate, irritate, obliterate
in just about all those other ates, but we can't see them.
We obviously sense them with our ears
and for that matter we don't hear light waves,
but we detect them with our eyes.
So when we try to demonstrate sound in a visible manner,
we tend to fall back on sinusoidal waves
or sine waves that are actually a visualization
of a mathematic equation, measuring the waves.
Ouch, that hurts just getting there,
like trying to convey the feeling of speeding down the road
at 100 miles per hour, showing a picture of a speedometer
pegged out in the red zone.
For all your effort, it's just a picture
of a measuring device and not the rush of speed.
You cannot ignore sound, and especially in this report.
There have been an enormous number of identities
crafted for industries making a lot of noise.
These sine waves seem to be the cliche of choice
to convey that message and they're everywhere,
but the challenge is the image of that frequency line
on an oscilloscope can be a bit fine to read,
once things scale down, always a concern.
Often we see an expanded pairing of waves
that allow for a solid fill between lines to read well.
Notice too that the crest of the wave
is generally varied dramatically to assure us
just how vocal they actually are.
I love the way that these waves modulate into a bird
and I'm left wondering if I could turn it up
and actually hear a bird call, hmm.
These waves seem to take on a bit more of a corporate feel
with a consistent tone.
Literally, the SPEEEX mark
has banged out the perfect harmony of a word mark
that subtly and effectively utilizes a frequency wave
and integrates a color shift as well
to demonstrate variety and change.
Such a great mark and no explanation necessary.
Designers have taken the liberty
of introducing various devices, including sound equalizers.
These walls of light-scaled towers
probably are what a more digital generation
is going to resonate with.
Though the mark for cactus is a fair representation
of an equalizer display as we know it.
Some other marks hybridize it with sine waves
and still convey the signal of sound.
There are a number of logos that actually get high marks
for attempting to push the boundaries beyond the expected.
Not sure any of these are literal references
to the device we use to measure sound,
but they have just enough rhythm
of stroke and modulation of line to signal sound in my mind.
Design never progresses fast enough for designers,
because rightfully, we need to be concerned
with receiving permission not from a client,
but from the public.
They can only be expected to respond to symbolic information
that they can recognize.
And until someone listening to my voice gets all clever,
that's one of the reasons waves and equalizers
represent a sound that we may never actually see.
You'd better get busy.