---
name: Auditory icon
slug: auditory-icon
category: interaction
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A recorded everyday sound standing for an event, so a crumple means
  delete by resembling the act rather than by convention learned in the
  interface.
aliases:
  - name: everyday sound
    source: community
  - name: sound icon
    source: community
  - name: natural sound cue
    source: community
tags:
  - icons
  - sound
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - earcon
    - skeuomorphism
    - interface-metaphor
  variantOf: []
  partOf:
    - microinteraction
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Gaver: Auditory Icons, Using Sound in Computer Interfaces
      (Human-Computer Interaction, 1986, 167-177)"
    url: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci0202_3
  - title: "Wikipedia: Earcon"
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earcon
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the sound that reports an event by resembling it
---

William Gaver proposed these in 1986, as the deliberate alternative to a screen full of
beeps. His argument was that everyday listening is not listening to sound, it is listening
to events: nobody hears a spectrum, they hear a heavy thing dropped on wood. So the sounds
an interface makes should be caricatures of naturally occurring sounds, exaggerated
recordings of real events, and the mapping to what happened should be as close to
physical as the interface can manage. He sorted the possibilities into three kinds:
symbolic, where the relation is pure convention, metaphorical, where it is a likeness, and
nomic, where the sound genuinely is what the thing would sound like. His SonicFinder made
the case in a real interface, where dragging a file scraped, dropping it thudded, and a
big file sounded bigger than a small one.

That is the whole discrimination against its sibling. An [earcon](/earcon) is a synthesized
figure whose meaning is learned, so a set of them has to be taught and can be built into a
family; an auditory icon is a recording whose meaning is recognised, so it needs no teaching
and cannot be extended by transposing anything. The trade runs in both directions. Nobody
has to be told that a crumple means the thing is gone, but the world only supplies sounds
for events that happen in it, and there is no everyday sound for "your two-factor code
expired". Interfaces in practice mix the two registers, which is fine as long as they do not
mix them for the same family of events.

Being a metaphor delivered as sound puts the term next to the visual metaphors and next to
their failure modes. It is the audio branch of an [interface metaphor](/interface-metaphor),
and it goes wrong the same way [skeuomorphism](/skeuomorphism) does: the reference ages out.
A camera shutter on a phone with no shutter, a modem handshake, a typewriter carriage on a
software keyboard, all of them were once nomic and are now a costume, understood by people
old enough to have heard the original and mystifying to everyone else. The rule of thumb is
to borrow from physics rather than from equipment, since paper still crumples and heavy
things still land, while machines get replaced.

Then there are the duties every sound in an interface owes, and they are the reason the
specimen here is silent until you press it yourself. Nothing plays unasked, the sound is
never the only report of anything (a muted phone is the normal case, and a person who cannot
hear it is owed the same information a listener gets), and a recording is heavier than a
tone in every sense: more bytes, more room to sound cheap, and much more likely to become
grating on the fortieth repetition. Where the noise is standing in for
[haptic feedback](/haptic-feedback) or for a visible change, ship the visible change too and
treat the sound as the part that can be turned off.