Choose a keyboard sound pack for where you type

Updated October 25, 2026

For long sessions pick a short, darker sound; for fast typing, the shortest; for writing, something with character. Play the six packs below on your own keyboard, then use their brightness and length figures to pick the rest.

How to read the figures

Each pack has two numbers, measured from its press sound:

• Brightness, in hertz, is the energy-weighted average frequency of a key press. Lower is darker and rounder; higher is sharper and carries further in a room.
• Length, in milliseconds, is how long a press sounds. Shorter sounds overlap less when you type fast.

In an office, with headphones

You hear it all day, so pick something you will not notice after an hour. Butter, the pack Teclo starts with, is a soft mechanical clack in the middle of the keyboard packs’ brightness range. Muffle is the same idea turned down: the shortest keyboard pack, at 55 ms. Cushion sounds like the rubber-dome keyboards most offices already had.

Keep the sound in your headphones. Teclo plays wherever your Mac’s output is set and has no headphones-only mode, so if you unplug, it comes out of the speakers until you pause it.

Late at night

Choose a low, rounded sound. Marimba has the second-lowest brightness of all 16 packs, at 713 Hz; only Bubble is lower, at 576 Hz. Rain, at 1,088 Hz and 70 ms, is lighter. Both are far from a keyboard, which some people find easier to ignore.

Coding sprints

Fast typing is where long sounds pile up. A user of Thock, another Mac app, reported that at “50 words per minute or more”, playing a press and a release for each key “results in too much sound”. At 50 words per minute you press about four keys a second (50 words of five characters, over 60 seconds), and at 80 words per minute more than six, so a key every 150 ms or so.

Terminal (45 ms) and Pixel (50 ms) are Teclo’s shortest packs and leave silence between even fast keys. If you want a keyboard, Muffle is the shortest mechanical one.

Long writing

Here a sound with character keeps you company. Typewriter slaps each key at a dark 944 Hz and rings a bell on Return, which marks each paragraph. Boulder is the deep, ringing keyboard, and Knuckle the bright, sharp one at 3,653 Hz, the brightest mechanical pack Teclo has.

Then fine-tune it

None of these quite right? Start from the closest one on Teclo’s Create page and move its sliders towards Soft, Deep, Short or Low: see record or design your own keyboard sounds. For the words people use about keyboard sounds, see thock, clack and creamy.