♪Sound & haptic design

Earcons, UI sounds, sonic branding, ADSR — interfaces you hear and feel. — 16 entries

A short, abstract sound crafted to represent a specific action or state — the auditory equivalent of an icon.

A short sound tied to a single interaction — a tap, toggle, or swipe — that lets your ears confirm what your finger just did.

A short musical motif that represents a brand the way a logo does — replayed across touchpoints until it's instantly recognizable.

A four-stage model — attack, decay, sustain, release — describing how a sound's loudness changes over time.

The four basic oscillator shapes — sine, square, sawtooth, triangle. A waveform's shape is literally its harmonic content, its timbre.

A sound broken down into how much energy it has at each frequency, from bass to treble — the equalizer bar graph is exactly this.

Positioning a sound anywhere between the left and right speakers — the thing that creates spatial and directional cues.

The trailing reflections a sound leaves as it bounces off surfaces — reverb is how your ears sense a space's size and material.

Pitch (how high a sound is) and tempo (how fast it plays) are independent axes — changing one doesn't have to change the other.

The longer the gap between an action and its sound, the harder it gets for the brain to feel the two are connected.

A sequence of vibration pulses with varied length and spacing — feedback you can feel with sound off.

Automatically lowering background audio volume when something important needs to cut through, then restoring it.

Automatically adjusting sounds from different sources so they're all perceived as equally loud, measured in LUFS.

How many times per second a sound is measured and stored. Set it too low and you get aliasing — a fake, wrong pitch that was never in the original.

Mapping numeric data to sound — pitch, volume, tempo — so patterns can be perceived by listening alone.

The deliberate choice not to add sound. When every event makes noise, eventually none of it gets heard.