Mnemonics—short audio branding—is one of those trends that come and go. The one for Intel was pretty well-known for a long time and spurred the creation of similar sonic identities (e.g., T-Mobile, Netflix). Apple announced in mid-October that they were dropping the “Plus” from their streaming service to be known simply as “Apple TV.” The news spurred a bunch of punditry around probable confusion with the Apple TV app and Apple TV hardware device.

Yesterday, Apple shared the new identity work that drops the ”+” from the streaming service name and logo. It’s in the form of the opening logo and mnemonic that will appear in front of shows.

In an interview, Finneas O’Connell (who goes by his stage name Finneas), brother of pop star Billie Eilish and her main collaborator, spilled the beans on how he came up with it. Chris Willman, writing for Variety:

Speaking via Zoom from his home studio, Finneas points to the piano behind him as a starting point for a fleeting piece of music whose instrumentation isn’t easy to pin down before it’s gone in one ear and out the other at the start of a viewing experience. “I have my upright piano back here, so I sat and started there. I’m always more able to make something quickly on a real instrument than I am with software. I played a chord that felt kind of hopeful and kind of optimistic, but had gravity to it and hopefully had a little bit of an enigmatic, mysterious quality. And so I had this chord thing happening and then I started building the sounds around it. I had these pieces of zinc and I was hitting them and then reversing the audio, and I was playing real piano and then reversing that, and playing these bass synthesizers and then pitching those up and gliding them down.”

Beyond the cool sound, I love how the logo sting seems to be inspired by early TV logo idents like this one for NBC from 1967.