A six-year sonic partnership — from the first notification sound in the consumer app to a complete audio brand including an audio logo, sonic branding guidelines, ad campaign music, and sounds for automated vehicle deliveries.
What started as a proposal to design notification sounds for a food delivery app has grown into one of the most comprehensive sonic branding engagements in Finnish tech. Over six years and ten projects, AP Sound — the duo of Tuomas Ahva and Pekka Pulli — has shaped every layer of Wolt's audio identity, from the micro-sounds inside the app to music for international ad campaigns.
The breadth of the work reflects something important: when sound is designed strategically from the ground up, it compounds. Each project builds on the last, creating a sonic world that is coherent across every touchpoint — app, marketing, and everything in between.
The first project began with a brief that was unusually well-considered for 2019: design custom notification sounds for the Wolt consumer app so that users can identify Wolt from the sound alone, and understand the status of their order without looking at the screen.
At the time, Wolt had no purposefully designed sounds anywhere in their apps. This project was a chance to lay the foundation — starting small and deliberately, with notification sounds as the entry point.
The core challenge was functional: a food delivery order moves through multiple states — confirmed, being prepared, picked up, on the way, delivered — and things can also go wrong. Delays happen. Orders get rejected. Each state needed its own sound, and the full set needed to feel like a coherent family.
Beyond function, the sounds needed to carry Wolt's brand character: warm, human, ambitious. Not clinical or generic. And they needed to work in the real world — in a pocket, in a noisy street, at low volume on a phone speaker.
We began with a sonic canvas — a concrete reference tool we used to align on direction before any sounds were composed. This workshop-based approach proved immediately valuable: through it, we discovered that what Wolt wanted was even more minimal than we had initially proposed. Less is more. Restraint was the right instinct.
From there, we mapped every step of the order flow together with Wolt's team, establishing exactly how many states needed a distinct sound, and what emotional quality each one should carry. Positive states needed to feel reassuring and light. Negative states — delays, rejections — needed to communicate clearly without causing anxiety.
We composed around 20 candidate sounds across the full order flow, presenting them in a structured session with the client. Through an iterative selection process, the final set was refined down to five — each one distinct enough to be immediately understood, minimal enough to wear well over thousands of listens.
The notification sounds shipped with the Wolt consumer app and have been heard by millions of users across Europe and beyond. Users are able to distinguish the status of their order — including whether something has gone wrong — from the sound alone, without looking at their phone.
The feedback has been consistently positive: people find the sounds pleasant and functional. The final delivery sound in particular has become distinctly recognisable — one of those rare UI sounds that people notice and remember.
Crucially, the foundation established in this first project — the sonic palette, the design principles, the workshop methodology — became the blueprint for everything that followed. The audio logo, the merchant app, the courier app, the ad campaigns: all of it grew from the roots laid here.