Design for the ears to provide information, to communicate and to experience.
I haven’t finished absorbing all that is contained in the article but it’s really worth digging into if you have any interest in the UX of sound. Sharing this also gives me a chance to complain about the poor sound UX (is that a term?) of Walmart in Charlottetown’s credit/debit card terminals. That extra beep drives me crazy as it infers an error.
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.