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

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