You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

These days, we're so used to the buzzing and pinging of our devices

that it often becomes part of the general background noise.

If you're in a busy environment, it can almost feel like an amorphous blob of electronic sound. But of course, these sounds don't just appear out of nowhere.

Every single one of them was designed by someone.

To make it into your phone or laptop, these little sounds probably went through multiple

rounds of revisions and approvals.

But even if a sound makes it all the way through that pipeline, that doesn't

guarantee it's going to be pleasant. A good device sound is satisfying, and a bad one can

stress you out. It turns out, this isn't just a matter of opinion. If we want the devices we use

every day to sound good, there are actually some pretty concrete ways to do

that. This story is brought to you and sponsored by the Adobe podcast, Wireframe. Here's host

Coy VIN. Back in October 2015, if you were shopping in the United States, you might have heard

something like this.

The U.S. was transitioning credit and debit cards away from magnetic strips,

those black stripes along the back of your cards, over to chip cards.

Chip cards are more secure, but they can't be read by older machines.

So stores needed new machines, machines that made a sound like this.

That sound is to remind you to take your card out of the machine. And for the people who work in stores with those devices, that noise can get really tiring. One day, sound designer Connor Moore walked into a local store with one of these chip readers.

As usual, he started chatting with the owner.

They're big Warriors fans, so I was going there and chat with them about the Warriors.

I went to check out and I just noticed the card reader sound for some reason in that particular environment. It was that infamous...

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