All posts about
Audio design

Things that Beep: A Brief History of Product Sound Design

Design for the ears to provide information, to communicate and to experience.

“As we move into an artificially intelligent world whose logics of operation often exceed our own understanding, perhaps we should linger a bit longer on those blips and clicks. Compressed within the beep is a whole symphony of historical resonances, socio-technical rhythms, political timbres, and cultural harmonies. Rather than simply signaling completion, marking a job done right, a beep instead intones the complex nature of our relationships to technology — and the material world more generally.”

Shannon Mattern ~ avant.org courtesy of designobserver

Why sound is digital design’s fourth dimension

Sound being a great design material, digitally and physically.

“One of the underappreciated repercussions of transitioning from a world more concerned with the movement of electrons than of gears, pistons, and flywheels is the elimination of noise. Sound, after all, is vibration propagated through some kind of medium (usually air), so the fewer moving parts there are disturbing the atmosphere around us, the fewer vibrations there are to reach our ears.”

(Christian Cantrell ~ FastCo Design)