The USPTO Just Made Sound and Motion Marks Searchable by Design Code

If you've ever tried to search for sound marks in the USPTO's trademark database, you know the drill: type "sound of" into the description field, try "chime," try "melody," try "three-note sequence," and hope the examiner who wrote the description used the same words you're guessing. There was no structured way to find them. You were keyword fishing.

That just changed.

On February 10, 2026, the USPTO added Category 30 to the Trademark Design Search Code Manual — the first new top-level category in years — dedicated entirely to sound and motion marks. For the first time, these non-traditional marks have their own searchable design codes, just like logos, geometric shapes, and every other visual element that's been coded since the system was created.

Why This Matters More Than You'd Think

Sound and motion marks are a small population — roughly 1,181 non-visual marks in the federal register, with 416 currently live. You might be tempted to shrug. But consider who owns them: NBC (the three chimes, filed in 1947 — one of the oldest non-visual marks on record), Intel (the bong), Netflix (the "ta-dum"), T-Mobile, Harley-Davidson, AT&T, and Twentieth Century Fox.

These aren't obscure filings. They're some of the most recognizable brand identifiers in existence. And the trend is accelerating. Filings have roughly doubled over the past decade:

• 2015: 38 non-visual filings
• 2020: 57
• 2023: 68
• 2025: 73 (and 2026 is already at 4 through early February)

As sonic branding becomes standard practice — think app startup sounds, UI feedback tones, podcast intros, retail environment audio — the clearance implications get real. Missing a relevant prior sound mark isn't a hypothetical risk. It's a malpractice scenario.

What's Actually in Category 30

The new category has 11 codes across two divisions: motion and sound.

Motion (1 code):

Code	Description
30.01.01	Motion of elements in mark, or other change such as growing, fading, or flickering

Sound (7 codes):

Code	Description
30.02.01	Music or musical instruments — notes, orchestras, melodies, rhythmic drumming
30.02.02	Human speech, singing, syllables, and utterances that can be rendered literally
30.02.03	Non-speech human sounds — whistling, clapping, breathing, sneezing, crowd noise
30.02.04	Animal sounds and imitations
30.02.05	Natural elements — weather, wind, water, fire, explosions
30.02.06	Objects, machinery, mechanical and electrical noises
30.02.07	Other sounds not elsewhere coded

The granularity here is the real upgrade. Before, "a chime" and "a lion's roar" and "a human voice saying three syllables" were all just... unstructured text in a description field. Now they're in different buckets. You can search for musical sounds (30.02.01) without wading through machinery noises, or look specifically for animal sounds (30.02.04) without false hits on human speech.

The Before and After

Before Category 30, your clearance workflow for a sound mark looked something like this:

1. Search the mark description field for keywords: "sound," "chime," "tone," "melody," "musical," etc.
2. Try variations, because description language isn't standardized — one examiner writes "three-note ascending chime" and another writes "a series of musical tones played in sequence"
3. Check the pseudo mark field (because sometimes the language only appears there, not in the literal element)
4. Filter by class, squint at results, manually review everything

It worked, sort of. But it was inherently incomplete because you were betting that your keywords matched whatever words the examiner chose. And it wasn't repeatable — two different searchers running the same clearance could get meaningfully different results.

With Category 30, you add a structured layer on top:

1. Search by the relevant Category 30 code(s) — e.g., 30.02.01 for musical sounds
2. Combine with class filters, owner searches, keyword searches
3. Still do the keyword/description search (the codes don't replace it — they augment it)
4. For motion marks, combine Category 30 codes with traditional figurative design codes (the USPTO explicitly says motion marks should be coded with both)

The result: a more defensible, more repeatable search that's less dependent on keyword luck.

Three Things the USPTO Wants You to Know

The Category 30 manual page includes some practice-relevant guidance that's easy to miss:

1. Cross-code aggressively. Sound marks often combine multiple sound types. A mark featuring "a human voice singing over a drumbeat" should be searched under both 30.02.02 (human speech/singing) and 30.02.01 (music/instruments). USPTO says the best results come from searching codes "together as well as separately."

2. Motion marks need dual coding. If a mark shows an animated logo sequence, it gets 30.01.01 plus whatever traditional figurative codes apply to the visual elements. Category 30 is an additional dimension, not a replacement.

3. Watch the pseudo mark field. This is a gotcha that catches people. For sound marks, the language describing the sound sometimes appears only in the pseudo mark information, not in the mark literal field. If your search only hits the literal field, you'll miss records. The USPTO specifically calls this out.

What This Signals

Adding a new top-level category to the Design Search Code Manual isn't a minor taxonomy update. It's an operational signal that the USPTO expects non-traditional mark filings to keep growing and that the search infrastructure needs to support them properly.

For practitioners, the takeaway is straightforward: if you're doing clearance for any brand that includes sonic or motion elements — and in 2026, that's an increasing number of brands — add Category 30 codes to your standard search checklist. The codes are live now.

---

GleanMark's trademark database already includes all 1,181 non-visual marks in the federal register, and our design code lookup tables have been updated with the new Category 30 codes. Search for trademarks →