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Twenty Thousand Hertz

Facebook & Google Pixel: Designing the perfect alert sound

Twenty Thousand Hertz

Dallas Taylor

Design, Music, Music Commentary, Arts

4.94.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are sounds we interact with every single day and never give a second thought. Our phones, computers, cars, and other devices are constantly communicating with us through user interface sounds and it’s their job to be heard, but not distracting. In this episode, we speak with Will Littlejohn, Facebook’s Director of Sound Design, and Conor O’Sullivan, Sound Design Lead at Google, about the sounds they create that help connect families, friends, and communities.  Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound. Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series. If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠mystery.20k.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Support the show and get ad-free episodes at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠20k.org/plus⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow Dallas on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠Facebook⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Join our community on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Reddit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Episode transcript, music, and credits can be found here: https://www.20k.org/episodes/facebook-and-google-pixel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

0:04.0

The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

0:08.0

I'm Dallas Taylor.

0:14.0

You probably don't think a lot about user interface or UI sounds.

0:20.0

These are the noises made by devices,

0:22.6

applications, and software we interact with. Everything from our iPhones to our airplanes

0:29.6

have UI sounds. We hear them all day, every day, but many of us never think twice about them. Why is that?

0:38.8

We're in service of the experience and to the people who use our products. We're not in

0:45.6

service of being noticed. In any particular experience, not being noticed is the right move.

0:52.3

That's Will Little John. I'm the first person to pull sounds out of an experience if they don't really serve a purpose.

0:59.0

He's the director of sound design at Facebook.

1:02.0

His team is responsible for the social media platform's U.I.S.

1:05.0

All the sounds in Messenger, all the sounds in Facebook.

1:10.0

If anyone knows about U.I sound design, it's Will.

1:16.6

I personally have been working in this space since the early 2000s.

1:20.6

Most people aren't even aware of that they're intimately interacting with sounds in a daily basis

1:25.6

in a way that's very, very personal to them and personal to their quality of life.

1:30.3

We process so much sound that our minds don't bring a lot of that to the forefront in terms of our consciousness.

1:37.3

But it's so powerful and how it guides and influences our daily lives that I've always felt that this is one of the most important types of work that I do is to really bring thoughtful

1:47.9

positive UI experiences to people through whatever products we're working on if we're interacting with something in the real world that's quite a different relationship than

1:57.6

leaning back and watching a film or TV. You're processing it in a different way.

2:05.1

Will, like many UI sound designers, believes that most of his team's work should go unnoticed by

...

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