Sound design
Deliberately building a thing's sound world: the whoosh on a transition, the click on a button, the thud when something lands.
See it
What it is
Sound design is the deliberate creation and shaping of a piece's sonic world: the whoosh under a transition, the click when a toggle flips, the low thud when a modal lands, and often the treated dialogue and the placement of the music too. The material comes from everywhere. Some is recorded on purpose, some pulled from libraries, some synthesized from nothing, and nearly all of it layered. A single 'whoosh' is usually filtered noise plus a pitch sweep plus a little reverb tail, stacked until it reads as one gesture.
Reach for it when an action needs to feel physical. The standard recipe is layers: a transient (the attack that gives it punch), a body (the tone that gives it character), and a tail (the reverb or decay that places it in a space). Film and games call the performed, recorded-to-picture version Foley: footsteps, cloth, keys. Interfaces call the short functional version an earcon.
The gotcha for product work: UI sounds get heard hundreds of times a day, so anything with a long tail or a sharp high end becomes torture by week two. Keep them under about 150ms, quiet (well below the dialogue), and always give people a mute. Also mind the medium: a cinematic braam designed on studio monitors turns into a rattle on a laptop speaker.
Ask AI for it
Design a set of UI sound effects for a web app: a button tap, a success confirmation, an error, and a panel-open whoosh. Build each from layers (short filtered-noise transient, a tonal body, a short reverb tail), keep every sound under 150ms except the whoosh, tune them to the same musical key so they don't clash, roll off harsh frequencies above 8kHz, and mix them roughly 18dB below dialogue level. Export as mono WAV.