Pencil Scratch

What it sounds like

Graphite dragging across rough paper. While you drag there is a continuous, slightly uneven scratch with a brighter grain riding on top, and it stops the instant you let go. It feels like the cursor has weight and the screen has tooth.

Good for

• Sketching, annotating and drawing apps
• Moving windows and dragging files, for a sense of friction
• Screen recordings where a drag should be audible

How it is made

Two sustained layers of noise, looped seamlessly: pink noise centered around 2.8 kHz, modulated at 23 Hz for the stroke, and a thinner white-noise layer around 5.2 kHz modulated at 61 Hz for the grain of the paper.

Every qliqr sound is synthesised from a small text recipe, so the version you hear here is the same one the Mac app plays, with natural variation so no two presses are identical.