The Keyclick Apocalypse

Look, I am a reasonably patient beast. Reasonably. I’ve come to terms with the transient nature of life, and the eventual heat death of the universe. But I cannot make room, cannot endure, the  endless stuttering beepboopboop of virtual keyboards on phones. Let’s be honest, if your keyclicks are turned on in public, you may well qualify as a kind of acoustic terrorist. And we need to talk.

“…and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

It’s not the only thing, of course, in the endless volume assault of the modern world. And all of the shouting, honking and blasting is annoying. But phone keyclicks are surely in a category of their own when it comes to sheer pointlessness. Somebody’s tinny Charli XCX gets on your nerves, but at least you figure the person listening is having some pleasure. What does the average beepbooper get from, well, beepbooping?  

Let’s establish the baseline: keyclicks are entirely functionally and spiritually pointless. Some people say it helps them type faster because they know they’ve made contact without having to read the screen. But how much faster? Science has already established that the human brain processes visual confirmation of a typed letter in no more than about 13 milliseconds. It’s also established that modern haptic engines—those little (silent) vibrations—provide more than enough sensory feedback to satisfy the lizard brain without feeling as if your ear has stepped on a Lego. And some studies even suggest that people who keep key sounds on actually type more slowly because they subconsciously wait for the sound to finish before hitting the next key (a 2024 study published in the Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Machine Learning found that "clicky" switches, which produce sounds, resulted in a lower average typing speed (67.33 WPM) compared to silent switches (76.5 WPM).)

Ah, comes the second argument: some people can’t see the screen clearly enough to even waste 13 milliseconds trying to read the letters as they come up. But the keyclicks don’t tell you what you typed. If you’re trying to type "I love you" but you accidentally type "j Kpft y” the clicks sound exactly the same. They are a confirmation of nothing but your own disregard for the peace of others.

There’s a third argument: I just like the sound. Well, even if there was anything remotely likeable about that sound, in a public place that’s not really the point, is it? In a public place we act, or are supposed to act, in more restrained fashion out of respect for others. In fact the public space is, almost by definition, the very place where we do not casually do the things “we just like” for that reason. Well, for that reason and the fact that we’d be arrested as often as not. 

There is actual research on this, and it’s as depressing as you’d expect. Studies on "Involuntary Musical Imagery" and auditory triggers suggest that repetitive, high-frequency "transient" sounds (like a digital click) are specifically tuned to pierce through background noise. It’s why smoke detectors beep at that specific pitch, or why babies’ cries are designed by evolution to be piercing rather than pleasant: your phone is literally using the "your house is on fire" frequency to tell you that you just typed…something.

Furthermore, a study out of the University of California, Irvine, famously looked into the subject of "Digital Distraction." They found that it takes 23 minutes to get back into a deep state of focus after being interrupted. Every time your phone sets off its 200-fire-alarms-per-text you are stealing 23 minutes of life from everyone within earshot; and even when you’ve stopped texting, somebody else will start. There is no respite. 

The "keyclicker" problem does not exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a very modern pyramid of sociopathic habits, and might just be the gateway drug to complete societal collapse. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the world needs to hear you typing, you’re a short step away from shouting at the phone you’re holding horizontally in front of your face; and from there it’s just a short slide into scrolling without headphones. This is demonstrably the final stage of human evolution.

We are constantly suffering from a kind of notification anxiety. Our brains are fried. We won’t even turn the noise off when it’s as easy as toggling a switch on the phone. What unnecessary noise-based horror is next? Shoes that digitally thud to let us know we’ve successfully found the ground again?  Forks that ping when they touch a potato? (Actually, come to think of it, that could work as a tomato warning.)

As a side note to all this, there is something called the Lombard Effect which goes a long way to explaining why the modern world has become so unbearable. It’s named after Étienne Lombard, a French otolaryngologist who noticed this in 1911 – just as modern sound-producing technologies were starting to become common – and it’s a reflexive increase in vocal intensity when the speaker is surrounded by background noise. Your brain realises the signal-to-noise ratio is failing, so it automatically cranks up the volume, changes the pitch, and even stretches out the vowels to ensure you’re heard.

It’s an effect perhaps most noticeable in chic modern hotels and homes, the ones whose magazine-driven décor is full of shiny surfaces, concrete floors and a minimum of soft fabrics. So two people sit down and talk at a normal level; then people at the next table start talking (or conducting the keyclick symphony) so the people at the first table reflexively start talking more loudly; which means the people at the second table have to talk more loudly too. In five minutes everyone is screaming like leaf blowers about nothing…so the restaurant has to turn up the music. Even at office meetings, one person on a speakerphone – those ugly noisemakers – have been shown to lead to vocal volume increases of up to 100% compared to ordinary face-to-face meetings (which are usually just as pointless, but politely so).

It’s both inevitable and odd that these days huge amounts of money are spent on developing noise cancelling technology while we are simultaneously designing buildings and devices that are not only loud themselves but trigger our brains to be as loud as possible.

It is a biological survival mechanism for the old, less human-tortured world, but it’s become a social catastrophe today.