Why Audio Deserves a Place in Web Design
Web design conversations tend to orbit the visual. That's understandable — there's a lot to see. But as devices have become more tactile and conversational, sight is no longer the only sense worth considering. George Lucas famously claimed that half of a movie's magic comes from its sound. The same logic applies to many online experiences: audio, when used thoughtfully, can add an entirely new dimension to a website.
Bad examples are easy to find — auto-playing videos being a prime offender — but the medium itself isn't the problem. The following sites demonstrate how audio can be woven into an experience without overwhelming it.
Audio Articles: When Writing Gets a Voice
The word "article" still implies words on a page, but that's an increasingly narrow definition. A growing number of publications are recognizing that words can be heard as well as read. The New Yorker is a standout example, offering audio versions of much of its fiction and non-fiction, often narrated by the authors themselves.
Recording Margaret Atwood isn't an option for most sites, but text-to-speech software has improved enough to make audio versions a realistic feature. Nieman Reports covered this trend extensively last year — complete with an audio version of the article itself.
Radio Garden: A World of Stations on a Globe
Websites don't have to conform to the usual grid layout. Radio Garden is proof, offering a globe you can spin to tune into radio stations from around the world. It's like Google Earth for live audio — a deceptively simple concept executed with playfulness and precision.
The experience relies on a stack of components: CesiumJS renders the globe, Esri provides satellite imagery, and Free GeoIP handles location detection. The result is a tour of the world's broadcasters in real time. Radiooooo deserves a mention too, offering a similar experience but with time travel as the twist.
Penderecki's Garden: A Composer's Memorial in Sound
The virtual memorial garden for Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer and avid gardener, is an unusual tribute. Visitors wander through the space with his music playing underneath. It's a moving homage and a strong piece of web design, with the audio as its centerpiece.
Akkers van Margraten: Preserving Oral Histories of WWII
Archival material can find new life online, and the Akkers van Margraten oral history project builds its entire site around audio content. Interview clips are paired with mournful musical arrangements that support the storytelling without overpowering the voices.
Without that music, the effect would likely be far less evocative. The combination helps interviewees conjure a specific time and place.
Netflix's Dark Guide: Ambient Sound as Atmosphere
Auto-playing media has earned its poor reputation, but the guide for Netflix's Dark shows how powerful it can be with restraint. Deep, ambient tones pull visitors directly into the show's mood from the moment the page loads.
The potential extends well beyond TV shows. Imagine a long-form horror story paired with dissonant drones, or a retrospective on the 1960s with era-appropriate music drifting in the background. The Dark guide illustrates how much atmosphere a well-chosen soundtrack can add.
DataArt IT Museum: Audio Tours Move Online
The DataArt IT Museum catalogues Eastern European tech hardware with care, but its real strength is in how it uses interview snippets. Like Akkers van Margraten, the audio ties artifacts to the people and contexts behind them, bridging the gap between past and present.
It's one of those ideas that feels inevitable once seen. Plenty of people have wandered through physical museums with an audio guide in hand. There's no reason the same option shouldn't exist online.
Ethics for Design: Fragmented Media as a Feature
Ethics for Design posed a question to a dozen designers and researchers: what is the role of a designer? Rather than assembling the answers into a single polished video, the site breaks everything into separate pieces, letting visitors navigate between text, sound, and video.
The approach is initially jarring, which may be the point. It forces a reconsideration of how much gets lost when we default to a single medium, and how each element fits into a larger whole.
SoundCloud's Persistent Player: An Interface With Flow
Some audio design is about subtle enhancements, but SoundCloud demonstrates a straightforward feature that works. Its music player keeps playing as visitors browse the rest of the site — clicking through pages doesn't stop the track.
It's a standard pattern in apps like Spotify, but less common on the open web. The untapped potential is significant. Combine it with audio articles, and a visitor could start listening to a story on a news site and continue browsing while it plays. That's a future worth building toward.
Sound Takes Many Forms
The sites above cover only part of the spectrum. Sound on the web can be radio, narration, interviews, music, or even just subtle interface cues. As technical capabilities keep expanding, sites are increasingly expected to be flexible — seen, touched, and more often heard. The web doesn't need to smell good or taste better, but sometimes it absolutely should be noisier.
