Sound Design & Audio

Sound is the channel that reaches an eye that's looking elsewhere — and the first thing users mute when it's abused. Design for restraint: silent by default, every cue earns its place, a tiny coherent palette, off the UI thread, always respectful of mute/DND. The worked identity here is the Harbor (a maritime operator console for an AI agent fleet), but the principles are general.

When to Use

• Deciding whether a given event should make a sound at all (most shouldn't).
• Designing a coherent set of UI cues (confirm/error/notify/transition/arrival/departure) as earcons or auditory icons.
• Giving a product a sonic identity (a motif family, not random samples).
• Synthesizing the actual sounds (which method for which cue) and mastering them for short-cue UI.
• Wiring playback/mixing in a native app, especially Rust/gpui.

NOT for

• Music composition / scoring for media (different craft).
• Speech synthesis / TTS / voice UX.
• Implementing DSP primitives or audio codecs from scratch.

Decision Points