99% Invisible

Sounds of the Artificial World

— ·99% Invisible ·5 min read

Brief

This 99% Invisible episode examines the hidden world of product sound design through Jim McKee of Earwax Productions, who creates the artificial sounds that make modern digital devices feel intuitive and mechanical. McKee explains that without sonic feedback, basic tasks like using a phone become confusing and disorienting - users lose the immediate confirmation that their actions registered.

The episode reveals McKee's creative process for generating device sounds, which involves collecting everyday objects in his dresser drawer and experimenting with their acoustic properties. His most successful sounds often come from unexpected sources: a marble dropped into a small ceramic bowl creates the bouncing dynamic that works well for button presses, while a vice grip opening provides the satisfying click that has become ubiquitous across digital interfaces, including what sounds like the iPhone's power-on tone. McKee typically presents clients with half a dozen variations of each sound, varying in volume and pitch, and has developed an intuition for predicting which option they'll choose.

The key insight is that the most effective product sounds are those that physically resonate with the device's chassis, creating a sense that the sound is 'indigenous' to the hardware rather than artificially overlaid. This resonance creates what McKee calls a 'theater of the mind' where users experience tactile feedback and mechanical articulation in purely electronic interactions, making digital devices feel more natural and responsive to use.

Why it matters

99% Invisible explores product sound design with Jim McKee of Earwax Productions, revealing how artificial sounds make digital devices feel mechanical and intuitive:

Key details

  • [insight] Modern devices rely entirely on artificial sounds since they lack moving mechanical parts that naturally create audio feedback
  • [process] Product sound designers create button sounds by recording everyday objects like marbles dropping into ceramic bowls or vice grips opening
  • [technique] The best device sounds use frequencies that physically resonate with the device chassis, making electronic interactions feel tactile
  • [example] iPhone's power-on sound likely derives from a vice grip opening sound that McKee's clients consistently preferred
  • [principle] Effective product sounds create 'theater of the mind' where users feel movement and texture where none physically exists
Cleaned source text

title: Sounds of the Artificial World

author: 99% Invisible

content_type: podcast

publication: 99% Invisible

word_count: 1230

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Exceptional by design. We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Without all the beeps, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. I mean try using your telephone without the beeps, and it's really confusing. You're lost immediately. Did I get it? No, I didn't get it. The number's there, but if you hear it. I used to get it physically with the rotary. For sound. This whole world is artificial. When I started, I was working with this guy at the Advanced Product Group at Apple. And he had a case for a walk man, I think, and he opened it up and he closed it and you heard it click. And he said, somebody worked really hard to make that click sound that way. That was an acoustical element on a mechanical device. Well, there aren't a lot of moving parts and mechanical bits in today's devices, but Jim McKee still has to make them sound right. My name is Jim McKee, and I have a company called Earwax Productions. We do sound for film, radio, internet, and product sound design. Quite simply, a product sound designer looks at a product and thinks, what kind of sound should this thing make when it does a particular thing? So typically, what I do is I create a bunch of button sounds. These are would-be buttons for a Yahoo widget. And say, okay, you guys tell me which ones are the closest and then you end up with what, 38 sounds here. I love that. I could listen to that all day. In fact, let's hear it again. Oh, yeah. The best sounds are not completely synthesized. They come from the everyday world. My top drawer, my dresser drawer at home. Over the years, I've been collecting all these little things. Oh, cool, a marble. I would leave it there. Oh, cool. This is a little tiny Chinese ceramic bowl or some kind of funky clip. And I realized that all these things are very kind of intimate to me, very close to me, but they make sounds. And the one cool one was dropping a small marble into this china bowl. And it has a dynamic to it, which everybody's familiar with. It bounces, but then it bounce with mep and mep and mep. That's the marble sped up and compressed and e-cute. And who knows what all sorts of things. Actually, the funniest one, the one that everybody loved, and it seems to have stuck more or less across the board, is the sound of a vice grip opening up because it's got the click in the spring. And for some reason, it just, it really works and people like the way it sounds. I think you can hear almost the same sound when you plug in your iPhone. They get powered. You know that oh, no, when you turn it on. If the device and it sounds are designed correctly, it creates a special theater of the mind that you completely buy into. Electronic things feel mechanical. It's the feeling of movement, texture, and articulation where none exists. On Jim McKee's most recent phone project, the sounds that worked best were the ones you felt. Resonating quality of the sound and relationship to the chassis itself is what sold it. It's like, oh, that feels, that really feels like it's part of this thing. And once you find those frequencies that resonate in a device, you keep exploring that space. Almost got to the point where I didn't even have to ask them which one they were going to select because I would give them, typically I would give them a half a dozen, once to pick from varying and volume, varying slightly in pitch. And I go, okay, it's going to be 46 B. And they come back and go, that, I don't know why, but that seems to work a lot better. You take any actor and put them in a room, and they're immediately going to find the size of the room with their voice, right? It's just human nature. And so why can't we expect the same thing out of our devices? You know, it's, it needs to feel like it's indigenous to this piece of plastic. 99% invisible with produced by me, Roman Mars with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects San Francisco in the Center for Architecture and Design. To find out more, put a 99% invisible dot org. Adam Palley here. And I'm John Gabriel. We're a couple actors and best friends, so you may know as the host of the TV show, one on one place, it's a party before you die. Now we're bringing you a comedic look at health and wellness with our new show, Staying Alive. 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