Pride of Cows | Sonic Identity

We work in three broad phases. Listen, Distill, Create.

With two kinds of input — research and storytelling. Research is the quantitative side: market data and research, psychoacoustics, the science of how we listen, and in the case of Pride of Cows — sensor research.

Storytelling is the qualitative side: what does the brand feel like, what world does it live in, what do these words mean when you try to turn them into something you can hear.

Music is subjective. “Warm” means something different to everyone in a room. Our process is designed to narrow that, to take something intangible and, through structured research and structured conversation, arrive at a place where everyone agrees on what it should sound like.

We research the brand, the audience, the category, and the raw material on the farm. We walk the consumer journey as a user. We read what customers say in their own words. We study what dairy sounds like — globally and in India — and map where the space is.

Specifically:

Brand sonic audit. We go through everything PoC currently puts out — socials, app, ads, delivery experience. We walk the full consumer journey, and see where any sonic elements are used, and where any could be.

Audience research. What does the 22–35 Mumbai premium consumer actually stream? What are their sonic reference points? What do words like “warm” and “natural” sound like to this specific audience — not in theory, but based on what they already listen to? What are sounds and memories that this audience associate with the brand values we are looking for.

Category mapping. What does dairy sound like? What instruments, tempo, emotional register does every brand default to? Where has the category converged, and where is the whitespace?

Conceptual research. We take the brief’s values — “warmth,” “quietly magical,” “rituals over routines,” “care” — and treat them as research questions. What does the psychoacoustics literature say about how these qualities behave as sound? What does ethnomusicology tell us?

Farm research. We visit the farm, to understand what sonic raw material exists: vocalisations, milking rhythms, ambient environment, seasonal patterns. Groundwork for the sonification stream.

Briefing call. Once the first phase of research is complete, we schedule a short call (roughly an hour) to clear any open questions before the workshop.

The audience. The 25–34 urban Indian consumer listens to nearly 4 hours of music a day, 29% above the global average.¹ On Spotify specifically, listening habits have reversed completely: at launch in 2019, nearly 70% of streams were international; today, more than 70% are Indian-origin music², a flip corroborated by industry-wide data showing 70.8% of all listening time now goes to Indian artists.¹ More than half of Indian listeners now pay for streaming, up 14.1% year-on-year.¹ Music and sound are central to how this audience moves through their day, and the musical grammar they’ve chosen is decisively Indian.

The category. Globally, dairy sonic branding is rare. Only a handful of dairy or dairy-adjacent brands have strategic sonic systems: Arla (Denmark, built from kulning, an ancient Scandinavian herding call), Nada and Almarai (both Saudi Arabia), and Danone’s So Delicious (US, dairy-free). In traditional dairy specifically, we’ve found three. The whitespace is real and significant.³

The app landscape. Of the premium apps this audience uses daily (CRED, Nykaa, Swiggy, Blinkit, Zepto), only Zomato and PhonePe have documented sonic identities. The whitespace isn’t just in dairy; it’s across premium Indian D2C.

Indian raga measurably improves dairy cow wellbeing. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science¹ tested Indian raga music against Chinese five-element music and a silent control across 60 Holstein cows over 60 days, with triple-blinded sample collection and analysis. The raga group showed a 31% drop in serum cortisol (p < 0.001), a 2.3% increase in milk yield, a 20% rise in immunoglobulin G, a 21% drop in oxidative stress markers, and rises in serotonin and β-endorphin. Raga outperformed the comparison music on almost every parameter. It is a rigorous study, and it points specifically at Indian classical traditions.

Chewing. A healthy cow ruminates roughly 7 hours a day at 30–60 chews per bolus cycle.² Rumination can be a useful proxy for cow contentment. A shift outside the normal range usually indicates something is wrong.

Lactation. Milk production peaks at 40–70 days post-calving, then gradually declines over a 305-day cycle.³

Annual composition. Milk-fat concentration peaks in January, protein in December, with summer nadirs, following clean cosine curves documented across 1,684 cows over a decade.⁴

Vocalisations. Mother-offspring contact calls centre on two frequencies, averaging 81 Hz and 153 Hz.⁵

Sensor technology. The neck collar (Allflex SenseHub) measures rumination, eating, and activity, reporting in periodic data blocks.⁶ The rumen bolus (smaXtec Classic) is a 105mm capsule administered once, resident for up to 5 years, measuring core body temperature, drinking events, rumination, and activity in near-real-time.⁷ During Discovery, we’ll audit what’s in place at Bhagyalakshmi and what’s feasible to add.

The workshop. What sounds natural and warm to one person may sound completely different to another. Synthesising our research, we work through a series of exercises and questions with a curated set of musical examples that help us find common ground. The exercises take us through the key emotions we want to create: “warmth,” “quietly magical,” “rituals over routines,” “care,” and help narrow them down into what they mean for the brand, and also give them more specificity that can help a musical composition process. We combine a set of exercises that encourage the participants to move from adjectives to more sensory and abstracted thinking, alongside listening through curated musical examples.

Part 1: What we’ve found. We share the competitive landscape, consumer research, and initial sonification experiments. Everyone works from the same picture.

Part 2: Sensory world-building. The brief gives us strong starting points: “the break of dawn, sunlight creeping over the farm,” “running through the farm, playing and hopping,” “quieting out all noises and focusing on the calm.” These capture real emotional territory. The workshop takes everyone there. We ask the room to close their eyes and step into these scenes, and then we ask them to add detail. What’s the temperature? What surface are you standing on? What do you smell? What do you taste? What’s the first sound you hear, and how close is it? The research shows people carry intuitive cross-sensory associations — we instinctively link certain sounds with certain shapes, textures, and qualities without musical training.¹ Pushing into texture, temperature, distance, and weight gives us material that’s specific enough to compose from. With that feeling still in the room, we play a curated mood board, pieces selected to sonify the sensory worlds that just surfaced, and score how closely each one matches what people described.

Part 3: Personality and character. We add another dimension. If Pride of Cows were a famous person or artist, who would it be? If its sound were a physical object, what would it be, still or moving, heavy or light, rough or smooth? Personalities and objects reveal something different from sensory scenes. The room might agree completely on the world they described in Part 2 but diverge sharply on character. That divergence matters, because it leads to fundamentally different sonic registers. Once the room settles on a personality and an object, we play pieces of music again and score how they match, testing whether the same references that felt right for the sensory world also carry the right character.

Part 4: Listening palette. With the sensory world and character established, we move through a wider curation. Mood board pieces, isolated sounds, instrumental palettes, songs across registers. This isn’t about judging music. It’s closer to a chef tasting ingredients or a painter laying out colours. We’re identifying what belongs in the palette and what doesn’t. A piece might have the right warmth but the wrong weight. A texture might feel like the world the room described but not the character. An instrument might land perfectly for one participant and feel completely foreign to another. We discuss each one, not “do you like this?” but “does this belong?”, and by the end, the room has collectively built a sonic vocabulary. These tones, these textures, these rhythms, these timbres are in. These are out. That palette is what we compose from.

We step away and triangulate three layers:

1. What the research says: psychoacoustics, audience data, category landscape.
2. What consumers say: app review language, streaming patterns, cultural references.
3. What came out of the room: the sensory world, the personality, the audio reactions.

We map where they converge, and differ, and share our findings in a report, distilling our key takeaways. Once we agree on these, we move forward to the next phase: creation.

We take two weeks and compose. We present three approaches. Each is a distinct concept. Each comes with:

• The concept and its rationale
• A visual/tonal moodboard
• A brand audio track
• A sonic logo

Three concepts. With each element realised.

We’ve learned that it’s always best to present the full story of an idea, and to present its realisation in all forms as soon as possible. Presenting the three approaches, with the moodboard, brand audio track, and sonic logo, allows people to see the full genesis of an idea, in a way that just a moodboard or a sonic logo can’t. They can see the statue in the stone more clearly, where an idea may be headed, or the possibilities it could inhabit, even if one element of it doesn’t quite sit right. Building on the tools from the workshop, we’re confident that with this process and material to reflect on, we have the shared vocabulary to look through these options together and lock what a final concept looks like at this stage.

Record sounds from Bhagyalakshmi: cow vocalisations, milking rhythms, bells, barn ambience, milk pouring, machinery. Process them using modern techniques like granular synthesis, spectral manipulation, and sampling. Categorise into melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and functional elements, which can then be mapped into a playable digital instrument. We then compose the sonic identity from that instrument.

The herd movements that inspire the PoC logo become a compositional input: the visual pattern of cows in motion mapped to musical movement and rhythm. The visual DNA of the brand becomes audible.

The instrument itself becomes a deliverable, that can define the sonic identity of the brand as it moves forward.

References:

Singapore Airlines: Translated the airline’s batik motif into a sonic pattern, assigning each of the 14 elements of the batik a melodic fragment to create a bespoke instrument with over 650,000 sound combinations.

Philips: A bespoke instrument built from 34 destroyed lightbulbs, smashed, bowed, and tapped, combined with natural human sounds like heartbeats and finger snaps. “The Philips Instrument” composed the brand’s sonic identity from the intersection of product and person.

Pride of Cows already plays music to its herd. Approach B is an extension of that practice, not a replacement for it. We compose music derived from the cows’ own biology, music that demonstrates the wellbeing the existing practice is meant to produce. The brand’s sound becomes a closed loop. Music in, biological response out, biological response composed back into music.

The science supports this specifically. As covered in Slide 5, Cao et al. 2025 found that Indian raga produced the strongest physiological benefits of any condition tested across 60 cows over 60 days, with a 31% drop in cortisol as the headline result. For a premium Indian dairy brand whose farm already plays music to the herd, that’s a scientifically grounded reason to root the sonic identity in raga frameworks rather than treat the choice as cultural decoration.

The wider music-and-cattle literature is small and most studies are single-farm. Cao et al. is a rigorous study, and its strongest finding happens to align with a cultural and creative direction available to the brand.

Approach B uses the sensor data Slide 5 describes as the compositional source for the brand’s sonic identity. The next three slides walk through how that works: why the data is already musical before we touch it, how Approach A’s bespoke instrument becomes the voice that plays it, and what the closed loop looks like end to end.

When you look at what the sensors actually measure, a lot of it has the shape of musical structure already. Tempo, contour, intervals, cycles. We still have to test how each of these translates compositionally, but the raw material is unusually well-suited to it.

Tempo. Rumination sits at 75–90 BPM. That isn’t a tempo we’d impose on the data, it’s the tempo the cow is already keeping. A healthy cow ruminating is, mechanically, already in time.

Melodic contour. The 305-day lactation cycle has a rise-peak-decline shape. That has the form of a melodic arc, and it’s unique to each cow. Every animal in the herd carries her own.

Counterpoint. Milk-fat peaks in January, protein in December, both following clean cosine curves in offset phase. Two biological variables cycling against each other, the structural ingredients of two-voice counterpoint, written by seasonal biology.

Intervals. The mother-offspring contact calls at 81 Hz and 153 Hz are roughly an octave apart. The herd is already vocalising in intervals.

How much of this is compositionally usable, and how much is interesting-but-not-musical, is one of the questions Discovery is designed to answer.

The structures the cows produce are musical, but they need a timbre to speak in. That’s where Approach A does its work.

The recordings from Bhagyalakshmi (cow vocalisations, milking rhythms, bells, barn ambience, milk pouring, machinery), processed through granular synthesis, spectral manipulation, and sampling, become the bespoke instrument that plays the score the cows are already writing. The rumination rhythm plays through it. The lactation arc plays through it. The seasonal counterpoint plays through it.

Approach A also stands alone as a complete sonic identity, for a brand that wants the farm in its sound without the sensor infrastructure. If sensor deployment proves too long or too costly to commit to in this scope, A delivers a full identity on its own, with the option to layer B’s live data dimension in later. The two approaches share material. They don’t depend on each other.

Pride of Cows plays music to the herd. Existing practice.

The right music, Indian raga, produces measurable physiological benefits. Cao et al., 2025.

Those benefits show up in biological data: rumination, milk composition, cortisol, yield. Captured continuously by sensors.

That data, already structured musically, becomes the score. The bespoke instrument from Approach A becomes the voice that plays it.

The resulting sound is, literally, the sound of healthy cows responding well to music.

Every notification on the app, every touchpoint in the delivery experience, every brand sound is built from a musical sonification of the herd’s live wellbeing data. When you order, you’re hearing evidence of the cow’s state that morning. The brand claim and the brand sound are the same object.

In our research, no other sonic identity in any category has this property. It’s an audible feedback loop between animal welfare and brand expression, and it’s only available to a brand that owns its supply chain end-to-end. Pride of Cows is one of very few brands in the world that could credibly do this.

Moonweave was sole audio consultant for Ola Electric. Beyond the brand sounds and chimes, the core challenge was motor sonification. An electric scooter is silent. It needed a voice.

We built a fully fledged synthesiser from the ground up, running inside the scooter’s onboard computer at near-zero CPU. On one end, it physically models the harmonic character of a 1960s Vespa engine. On the other, it generates entirely fictional sci-fi motor sounds. Three distinct personalities, one lightweight system, all responding in real time to live riding data. Throttle, speed, acceleration. No samples, no loops, no licensed software.

Ola had been quoted a licensing cost for off-the-shelf software that would have amounted to a minimum of 3 crore across their projected sales. We built something better, proprietary, at a fraction of the cost and a tenth of the memory footprint. It shipped to every S1 owner via OTA update and became one of the scooter’s signature features.

This is the same methodology Approach B applies to Pride of Cows: direct sonification of raw data, in real time. The next slide is Bolt, one of the three motor sounds, built from just three data points: speed, RPM, and throttle. Even with that little, the system produces a complex, responsive, layered sound. The same principle applies here. Even with limited sensor data from rumen monitors or neck collars, there’s enough to build something meaningful.

Project Fee: ₹25,00,000 (Twenty-Five Lakhs)

Inclusive of:

• Full discovery, farm visit, and data acquisition
• Data sonification pipeline development
• Workshop and synthesis
• 3 approaches × 2 options (6 sonic sketches)
• 2 rounds of iteration within selected approach
• Sonic logo + mini sonic logo + brand audio track
• Mastering and final delivery

Regression clause: Once an approach is selected at the Week 6 gate, we commit fully to it, and further composition, iteration, and refinement all build from that direction. If, after that point, the client decides to revisit the brief and requests fresh approaches from scratch, that constitutes a full regression and requires a new scope of work at an additional fee of ₹5,00,000 (Five Lakhs). This covers restarting the creative process: new compositional directions, new explorations, and a new round of approach development.

Payment structure: 50% advance upon signing. 50% upon delivery of final assets.

Revision rounds: 2 rounds included within the selected approach. Additional rounds at ₹2,00,000 (Two Lakhs) per round.

Timeline: The proposed schedule assumes timely client feedback, availability of key stakeholders for scheduled meetings, and no changes to scope. Delays in any of these will be reflected in adjusted milestones.