I sprint. I run across the kitchen mid-sentence, heart hammering, dodging the island counter. I am not fleeing a fire. No pot is boiling over. I am racing to silence the microwave.
It takes about one second. That’s all it takes to open the door before the counter hits zero. To preempt the shrill, grating beep that signals my popcorn is ready. Why do I do this? Because that sound is an assault. It triggers a conditioned reflex so strong it feels biological. I hate it. And I suspect you do too.
But here is the twist: the hardware doesn’t have to change. We can fix this. Right now. With a few lines of code.
The Cost of Silence (Or Rather, Noise)
Enter Joel Corelitz and Colin Corelitz. They are from Starling, a two-person startup. These guys are sound designers with serious pedigrees. They have worked for Sony, Microsoft, Netflix, Sega, and even Ford on sonic strategies. They know what sound does to a person.
Corelitz hated his own microwave beep. So he decided to break it. Or rather, to rewrite it.
The culprit isn’t new tech. It’s ancient, cheap tech. The piezoelectric buzzer.
This small, passive device has been the standard since the 1970s. Japanese manufacturers dumped them on the market. They cost pennies. A membrane vibrates when charged. Basic. Efficient. But boring. Terribly boring.
Manufacturers love them. Why? Margins. White goods competition is fierce. Adding a real speaker? That costs money. It adds bulk. It complicates the supply chain. A piezo buzzer is the path of least resistance. So for decades, every microwave on the planet has emitted the same high-pitched whine.
Coding a Cure
Corelitz and Coogan asked a simple question: Can we make this sound better without changing the hardware?
Yes.
“Any microcontroller that accepts C++,” Corelitz explains, “can take different programming and produce different sounds.”
There is already a chip in your microwave. There is already the piezo buzzer. The bottleneck is the code, not the silicon.
On a laptop, Corelitz uses software called Microwave Sound Bench. He demonstrates the old beep first. The one you know. The one that spikes your cortisol. Then he switches the code.
Suddenly, the noise is gone. Replaced by trills. Frequency sweeps that sound like a Looney Tunes fall. Arpeggios. Sequences that feel like level-up notifications from an old Nintendo game. None of it sounds like a microwave.
It is a thousand times better.
He runs these tests on an Arduino UNO R4 Minima. A breadboard. Three different piezo buzzers. It is laughably minimal setup. Yet the results are profound.
Corelitz even fakes volume. Piezos have resonant frequencies. By sweeping through them, he creates dynamic shifts. The sound gets louder, softer. It feels alive. But it is all illusion. The hardware output is flat. The code does the heavy lifting.
The $50 Solution
What about button clicks? Those repetitive, harsh beeps when you cycle through menus? Starling solved that too. They recreated the soft, premium click of a smartphone keyboard.
“I just wanted to see what a 4000-Hz beep for 1 millisecond would sound like,” Corelitz says. “It actually sounded pretty good. It would make a microwave infinitely more satisfying.”
The reaction on social media was immediate. And telling.
“People kept commenting, ‘Oh my God, I’d pay $50 more for a better sound,’” Coogan says.
There is demand for this. People want the dopamine hit of good audio cues. They don’t want the auditory abuse of a buzzer.
Why Brands Still Use Bad Tech
Richard Hughes knows the industry inside out. He was Whirlpool’s principal UX designer for 15 years. Now he leads digital experiences for Volvo.
He confirms what Starling found. The problem isn’t just cost. It’s expertise.
“Many companies lack internal audio expertise,” Hughes says. They focus on engineering noise. Vibration. Durability. But sound design? That’s an afterthought.
Hughes experimented with piezos at Whirlpool, too. He helped launch a KitchenAid Pro Line toaster with a “flight attendant” chime. Softer. Rounder. People loved it. They referenced it years later.
But microwaves? The specs are carried over product to product. Aesthetic updates hide the same old technical insides. The behavior spec remains unchanged. Hence, the piercing, identical noise across brands.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Is change coming?
Yes. Hughes believes we are at a tipping point. Companies are focusing on higher-margin products now. But the strategy is trickling down.
Hughle led a sound strategy initiative at Whirlpool before leaving. He mandated an assessment of the “lowest common denominator” at the piezo level.
It is low-hanging fruit. Literally.
“Delighters play a key role in purchasing,” Hughes notes. The small touches that make a product feel magical. The code change required to replace a shriek with a chime costs nothing. It saves millions in hardware upgrades.
All it takes is permission to change a file.
My microwave is still a beast. I still sprint for it. But now I know the fix is sitting there, dormant in the circuitry. Waiting for a manufacturer to be brave enough to run a simple C++ script.
Until then, I run. I open the door. I beat the beep.
