I like to browse through Wards Wiki. You'll never know what you find over there. Today, I found BeekSpeek which is all about the noise pollution that our computers constantly spit out.

It is particularly bad on the interweb, especially "designer" websites where every freaking high-class (re)design needs the IDM soundtrack they ripped from their most recent acquisition at the independant record store.

I have my own soundtrack thanks. Sometimes it's called silence.

AlistarCockburn had something particularly interesting to say...

At an HumanComputerInteraction conference some years ago, someone mentioned adding sound; person from the audience said, "I don't like all those extra noises coming from my neighbors machine"; then someone piped in with... "You want something really subtle. You don't pay attention to the sounds of people walking down the corridor, until you hear the unmistakable shuffle of your boss. You notice it right away, and nobody else does. That's the kind of sound effects you want." Which reminds me of a generalization that I noticed a few years ago - computer programmers operate in saturated colors and sounds. The world operates in pastels and very unsaturated colors and sounds. Watching an artist arrange colors on the screen was instructive - the artist chose proximate, faded colors, where most computer people choose varied, saturated colors. The same thing is operating here with sounds.

Which Brings up The Microsoft Sound Brian Eno Created.

I have tried to build/architect sounds for the user interface, and I found all of them basically un-useable after a few days. (It really was a case of eating my own dog food). It is difficult work. You want sounds to cut across any other aural distraction, but at the same time, not be distracting in of themselves.

The best success I ever had was at one of my old jobs where I was doing some web-based Java development. The IDE I was working with let you attach sounds to build events .. (build passed, build failed, etc.). To which I applied cut-up pitched/sped up (160 BPM) versions of the Think (about it) break. It worked well enough.

Maybe I should get back into that aspect of composition. Lately my time has been fractured, so It's hard to set aside a block of 6 hours to compose a track. but 2 or 3 to work on a sound? Could prove fruitful.