The Solution

After a fruitful back and forth marked by a series of brainstorming workshops, we began to unearth the core principles of Metro and how to translate them into sound.

Travel in Time and Space

Firstly, we noticed how Metro puts a great emphasis on its ability to move people around the city in a blink of an eye. Users descend into the station expecting the metros to come in a few minutes. We jump on and zoom! Off to our next destination.
To represent this attribute of speed we decided to take real world recordings of the trains arriving and departing, giving the listener a real world memento of the metro’s ability to make you travel in time and space.

Second Nature

Secondly, we took inspiration from The Copenhagen Metro’s ethos of simplicity; noticeable from the unique design of their train stations all the way to the driverless train experience. Clean, minimal and easy.

To represent this we created a short melody that stuttered twice and finalized on the home note. As if to say 2 steps in 2 steps out, and you are home. So simple it feels like Second Nature.

Speaking of driverless and minimal, there’s an inherent coldness to urban trains. With this in mind, we wanted to infuse the brand with some warmth through sound, whether it be using human voices, piano and other acoustic instruments.

Down Up Down Up

Finally, we decided to honor the underground-overground essence of the Metro, by imbuing the audio logo with dynamism.

This was represented through the dynamic use of the passby sound recordings swooshing in and out of the station. There’s a clear pulse and playful rhythm to the composition through intentional use of silence. Finally, the stuttering melody quite literally goes down up down up, home!

Due to the nature of Metro’s ads which tend to be mostly silent and dry in humor, we created a softer version to be used for these scenarios.

Music

We also created a longer music track that elaborates on Metro’s new sonic identity, weaving in and out between the different moods and emotions of the people experiencing the brand on a daily basis.

Thies Bouwhuis, producer on the project added;

“Getting to see and work on the whole process really taught me a lot about the Sonic Minds way of working which has been really interesting for me! With many projects in the ads world you create something, they run it under an ad, and you’re on to the next. But in the case of Metro we really worked hard to create a whole world of sound that can apply to all sorts of use cases for their world.”

From the morning drone to the afternoon rush and pulsating night culture. Copenhagen is a bustling city with a lot going on, and we were pleased to provide the soundtrack for it.