Quartz

What it sounds like

Glassy and exact, with a faint crystalline ring that hangs for a few hundredths of a second after the strike. It has almost no low end, so it reads as small and hard rather than loud. Each click feels like tapping a watch crystal with a fingernail.

Good for

• Precision work: vector tools, grids, pixel nudging
• Laptop speakers, where the high register carries best
• People who like a click that is more ping than thud

How it is made

A hiss of white noise high-passed above 6 kHz, and a 3.8 kHz sine with a touch of FM to roughen it into inharmonic partials. Both are shaped by a narrow, strongly resonant body at about 4.1 and 6.3 kHz, which is where the ring comes from.

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.