You know the sound. That shrill, penetrating beeeep your microwave fires off the instant it finishes reheating last night’s leftovers. For sound designers Joel Corelitz and Colin Coogan, that noise wasn’t just annoying — it was a problem worth solving. Their two-person studio, Starling, has previously worked with Sony, Microsoft, Netflix and Sega, and even crafted a sonic strategy for Ford’s entire lineup. Now they’ve turned their ears to the humble kitchen appliance.
The genius of their approach is what it doesn’t require: no new hardware, no pricier components, no engineering overhaul. Just code.
Almost every microwave on the planet generates its ping using a passive piezoelectric buzzer — a vibrating membrane that costs literal cents, first pushed into the mass market by Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s. It’s cheap, simple, and utterly limited. Makers can set frequency and duration, and that’s essentially it. The result is the same cortisol-spiking tone across the entire industry.
Corelitz and Coogan realized that the microcontroller already sitting inside your microwave can be reprogrammed. “Any microcontroller that accepts C++ can take different programming and produce different sounds,” Corelitz explains. “There’s already a microcontroller in there, and there’s already a piezo buzzer.”
Their test rig is charmingly minimal:
- An Arduino UNO R4 Minima microcontroller
- A breadboard with three piezo buzzers for comparing output
- One bare buzzer stuck to a sheet of paper so it resonates more
On software they built called Microwave Sound Bench, Corelitz first recreates the beeps we all loathe, then switches to Starling’s alternatives: rapid trills, cartoonish frequency sweeps, arpeggios, playful sequences that sound like they belong in a video game. None of them sound like a microwave — and all of them are vastly more pleasant.
The clever trick is faking volume. “If you sweep through the frequencies, you’ll notice that at a certain frequency range the buzzers just sound louder, because they prefer that resonance,” Corelitz says. That resonant sweet spot lets him simulate dynamics, so the sounds seem to swell and fade even though the hardware can’t actually change volume. To fix the harsh repetitive beeps when scrolling menus, Starling recreated the soft, satisfying click you feel typing on a smartphone — a 4,000-Hz tone lasting just one millisecond.
Richard Hughes, now Volvo’s design lead for digital UX in North America and formerly Whirlpool’s principal UX designer for 15 years, isn’t surprised these appliances sound awful. “A lot of these companies don’t have internal audio expertise,” he says. Behavior specs get carried over between models, which is “why they all sound the same, they all sound awful.”
The appetite is clearly there. When Starling posted their experiments to Instagram, the loudest refrain was people insisting they’d happily pay $50 more for a better-sounding microwave. Corelitz and Coogan would gladly work with the likes of Panasonic or Samsung — and if a brand simply borrows the idea, they’re relaxed about it. “We just want to solve the problem of going through the world hearing noises that are annoying and don’t contain good information,” says Corelitz.
