I behave very strangely in my kitchen. On any given day, you will find me, often mid-conversation, sprinting from one end of the room to the other. Nothing on the stove has caught fire. No pots are boiling over. I am trying to reach the microwave oven before its counter hits zero.

Why? I detest so deeply its shrill beep heralding the completion of its reheating duties that it's almost as if the appliance has trained me, through operant conditioning, to open its door at T-minus 1 second, so the grating noise is silenced before it begins. But there is another way, a means by which microwave makers can keep their margins, not change the hardware in any way, and, just by manipulating a few lines of code, change the kitchen experience sonically for the better for aurally assaulted microwavers everywhere.

Enter Joel Corelitz and Colin Coogan from Starling, sound designers who have previously worked with clients including Sony, Microsoft, Netflix, and Sega, as well as on major projects such as a sonic strategy for Ford's entire lineup. Corelitz, much like the rest of us, loathes his microwave's unbearable beeps, so he decided to see if they could do something about it.

Beep Beep

The beep has cursed humanity for a relatively short period of time. The use of “beep” to mean a short, high-pitched sound first appeared in an Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi story, The Sands of Mars, as recently as 1951. Before this, “beep” was used as a descriptor of the sound of car horns.

For decades now, nearly all microwaves have used the same technology to generate their penetrating pings: a small, cheap device called a passive piezoelectric buzzer. It's a membrane that, when electrically charged, vibrates, producing a rudimentary beep.

The piezo buzzer was first brought to the mass market in the 1970s by Japanese manufacturers. Thanks to their low cost—piezoelectric buzzers cost a matter of cents—and simplicity, the buzzers soon found their way into all manner of gadgets: toys, smoke detectors, alarm clocks, multimeters, watches, and, yes, microwaves. However, the versatility was matched by limitations. Manufacturers can set the beep's frequency and duration, but that's about it. This has not stopped the basic tech from still being widely deployed in all manner of gear.

Manufacturers can add speakers to a microwave, allowing the appliance to reproduce a cornucopia of aural delights. But the reason the vast majority of microwave manufacturers stubbornly stick with offensive beeps is, naturally, cost. Competition in consumer white goods is fierce. Why replace a super-cheap part that does the job with something pricier?

The challenge Corelitz and Coogan set themselves was this: better microwave sound, sound with some personality; but no new hardware, so using existing chips and existing buzzers. Everything had to be done just with code.

“Any microcontroller that accepts C++ can take different programming and produce different sounds," Corelitz says. "There's already a microcontroller in there, and there's already a piezo buzzer.” He has fashioned a series of sounds that are a world away from traditional microwave beeps, yet all are created using the same kit inside the box sitting in your kitchen.

On a laptop using software the pair have created called Microwave Sound Bench, Corelitz demonstrates by re-creating the horrendous beeps we know and hate. Then he switches to Starling's alternatives. Trills where the duration of notes is super short; frequency sweeps that sound like a cartoon falling object; arpeggios; a “sequence of events” that create a noise that seems like it belongs more in a video game. None sound like a microwave. All are a thousand times better than the cortisol-inducing tone that emits from my kitchen each morning.

“I'm doing it all on an Arduino, but it's really just C++," Corelitz says. "A manufacturer would have to be open to putting new code in their device, but that's it. It's theoretically compatible with any hardware that's in a microwave.”

His test-specific setup is laughably minimal: a microcontroller (the Arduino UNO R4 Minima), and a breadboard with three different piezo buzzers attached for comparing output—two attached directly to the breadboard (the black circular objects), and one bare buzzer stuck to a sheet of paper, which helps it resonate more.

Corelitz has a way to fake volume from piezo tech. “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,” he says. “You can use that resonant frequency to simulate dynamics.” And it works. You'd swear Starling's sounds get louder and quieter, but that's not happening.

To banish repetitive harsh beeps when pressing multiple buttons, like when you're cycling through the microwave's menus, Starling has also re-created the soft, premium click you get on your smartphone when typing. “I just wanted to see what a 4,000-Hz beep for one millisecond would sound like, and I was like, ‘Oh, that actually sounds pretty good.’ It would make a microwave infinitely more satisfying to use,” Corelitz says.

Coogan says it can be more challenging to communicate a lot with a little, which made the challenge more enticing to them both. But the response on Instagram seems to suggest there's more than sound aesthetics at stake here.

“One of the top things that people kept commenting over and over again was, ‘Oh my God, I would pay $50 more for a microwave that sounded better,’” Coogan says. It seems there's gold in them thar trills.

Sound Design

Richard Hughes, now Volvo's design lead for digital user experiences and interfaces in North America, was the principal UX designer at Whirlpool for 15 years. He knows his beeps. He also knows why established brands still sell bad-sounding microwaves.

“A lot of these companies don't have internal audio expertise," Hughes says. "They do on engineering for product noise, but very little sound design.”

Hughes, while at Whirlpool, did indeed experiment with beeps in a remarkably similar way to Starling, using piezos hooked up to an Arduino. And he says the company launched a KitchenAid Pro Line toaster where people loved its piezo sound.

“It was a very expensive toaster, but people referenced its ‘flight attendant call button’ sound,” Hughes says. “It was a much softer, rounder sound, and people love that to this day.” No such care went into fettling microwave audio at Whirlpool, according to Hughes, because the company just didn't produce a premium model where users would expect better beeps. Many of the microwave's sounds are carried over from one product to the next.

“[Manufacturers] may update the aesthetic, but the technical insides, that behavior spec is carried over, which is why they all sound the same, they all sound awful, and it's that piercing noise we've all come to hate.”

Fortunately, it seems we're finally about to enter a world where our microwave sounds don't suck. “It's trickling down," Hughes says. "Companies have been focusing on product lines with more margin, but you're going to see that cascading into the microwave.” He added that when he finished at Whirlpool, he led a sound strategy initiative for a few products that should be entering the market right about now. As part of those strategies, Hughes made it imperative that Whirlpool assess what the lowest common denominator looked like at the piezo level.

This is, after all, the very definition of low-hanging fruit. An easy win. No extra hardware cost, just attention to detail. “Within the last few years, realization has hit that ‘delighters’ play a key role in someone purchasing your product," says Hughes. "The things that make it a little more magical.”

The duo at Starling agree. That's what they aim to supply: delighters. And since putting their sonic experiments out there, while they'd be delighted to work with the likes of Panasonic or Samsung, they're not concerned if a company wants to “borrow” their ideas and take things in-house.

“It's not a big fear that someone's going to steal this," Corelitz says. "I'd hope our sensibilities as designers, as audio consultants, is more valuable than this. We just want to solve the problem of going through the world hearing noises that are annoying and don't contain good information.”

So, now that microwaves are sorted, what's next? Does Starling have a hit list of annoying noises? “Oh, we have a few,” Coogan says. “We'll have to see who wants to work with us.”