BEHIND THE SCENES
Now Hear This
Josh Mobley puts a lot of work into apps like Heads Up! and Clear—and he hopes you never notice any of it.
As a sound designer—the person who creates all those beautiful blips, chimes, and short melodies—Mobley’s goal is to compose audio that complements an app without demanding your attention. “If a sound stands out too much, I’m not doing my job,” he says. “Sound is something that’s almost felt, not heard.”
You’re probably familiar with Mobley’s work, even if you don’t know it. He created the very pleasing jackpot sound that plays whenever you complete a task in the productivity app Clear. And if you’ve ever enjoyed a fierce game of Heads Up!, or organized your contacts with Cardhop, you’ve encountered Mobley’s compositions.
Mobley begins his design process by figuring out the type of sound he needs. It generally falls into one of two categories.
The first is repetitive sounds. These have to be quick and simple—a bubble pop or a short chime. Just an accent. “If those were musical and heavy, they would be fatiguing,” Mobley says.
Sounds for more significant moments, like when you receive an important message or achieve a milestone, fall into a second category. These can demand greater attention and be more complex. Mobley sees them as “a sonic reward that makes you happy.”
Whatever he’s working on, Mobley sticks to the upper registers. “Those frequencies tend to trigger your ear more,” he says. Plus higher-register sounds just seem happier, he adds.
His “happy birthday” notification in Cardhop is the perfect example. “At first we experimented with a kazoo. That didn’t work, so we moved toward a melodic riff,” Mobley says.
From there, it was a matter of trial and error until he found the right tone. “I found a synthesizer preset that sounded like a mallet, so we played with the melody and shape of the sound until we arrived at the final version.”
While Mobley strives to stay under the radar, there are times when his fans—yes, fans—surprise him. “When Clear launched, people would create lists just to archive them and hear the ‘complete’ sound over and over again,” he says. One fan went even further. “He took all of the sounds and made a song with it,” Mobley says. “It’s really humbling, and it kind of validates my obsessive nature with this stuff.”