You're listening to 20,000 hurts.

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

I'm Dallas Taylor. You probably don't think a lot about user interface or UI sounds.

These are the noises made by devices, applications, and software we interact with.

Everything from our iPhones to our airplanes have UI sounds. We hear them all day, every day, but many of us never think twice

about them. Why is that? We're in service of the experience and to the people who use our products. We're not in service of

being noticed. In any particular experience, not being noticed is the right move. 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. He's the

director of sound design at Facebook. His team is responsible for the social media platforms

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

If anyone knows about UI sound design, it's will.

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

Most people aren't even aware that they're intimately

interacting with sounds in a daily basis in a way that's very very personal to

them and personal to their quality of life. We process so much sound that our minds don't bring a lot of that to the forefront in terms of our consciousness.

But it's so powerful in 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

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 leaning back and watching a film or TV.

You're processing it in a different way. Will, like many UI sound designers,

believes that most of his team's work should go unnoticed by consumers

because when a sound does stand out it's a problem.

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