How to Use Slack Notification Sounds to Improve Team Learning in Remote Work
Welcome. Somebody on your first call probably said "you'll want to set up your sounds" and then moved on. This is the part they skipped.
The team runs custom notification sounds on macOS. When your laptop makes a noise, the noise tells you something specific before you look at the screen. It takes about fifteen minutes to set up and roughly a week before you stop consciously decoding it.
What you'll hear
There are three shared sounds. Learn these first and ignore everything people tell you about their personal setups until week two.
The short chime
Someone said your name. This covers direct messages and @mentions in any channel. It is the only sound that means a human is waiting on you specifically, so it is worth turning around for.
The two-note tone
Something landed in a #prod-* channel. Production incidents, deploy failures, alerting output. You are not on call yet, so during your first month this is context rather than an obligation. Listen for it, read the channel, but nobody expects you to act.
Everything else, which is silent
General channels, threads you follow, #random, the standup bot. All of it arrives with no sound at all. This is deliberate. You check those on your own schedule, usually between blocks of work. If you feel anxious about missing something in a silent channel during week one, that is normal and it fades.
Setting yours up
1. Install Chirpy and grant Accessibility permission
Chirpy is the app the team uses. Native macOS menu bar app, 7.8 MB, needs macOS 13 (Ventura) or later. Ask your manager about the license; it is $19.99 once, no subscription, and there is a 3-day free trial with no credit card if you want to try it before that conversation happens.
On first launch it asks for Accessibility permission in System Settings. Grant it. That is how the app reads incoming macOS notifications, entirely on your machine. It never signs into Slack, never sees your workspace, and nothing leaves your Mac.
2. Turn Slack's own sound off
Open Slack, go to Preferences, then Notifications, and set the notification sound to None. Skip this and you will hear two sounds for every message and assume the setup is broken. Most new joiners hit this once.
3. Copy the three team rules
In Chirpy, create three rules:
- Match on your own name and on direct messages, and pick a short, high chime. Set the volume slightly above the others.
- Match on channel
#prod-*. The wildcard covers incident channels that get created mid-outage, which is exactly when nobody is thinking about notification config.
- Match on your manager by name, with a distinct sound. Keep this one quiet. It is for recognition, not urgency.
Order matters. Rules run by priority, so put the mention rule first. Otherwise a message from your manager that also mentions you plays the wrong sound.
Test each one before you move on. Ask whoever is onboarding you to send you a direct message and post something in a test channel matching #prod-. If you hear nothing, the usual cause is that Accessibility permission was granted to an older copy of the app still sitting in your Downloads folder rather than the one in Applications.
4. Wait a week, then add one rule
Do not build a fourth, fifth and sixth rule on day one. Live with three and notice what you keep missing. Most people end up adding exactly one thing: a keyword rule for the system they own, or a channel they support. Add that, and stop.
Two things people ask
Can I use my own sounds? Yes. There are 72+ built in, and you can drop in your own .mp3, .wav or .caf files. Keep custom sounds short. Anything over a second gets annoying by Thursday.
What about Microsoft Teams and everything else? Rules match on the app as well as the channel, so if you end up in a customer project that runs on Teams you can give it its own sound rather than trying to tell two apps apart by tone.
Do my rules have to match anyone else's? No, and mostly they don't. Shared vocabulary is useful so we can say "did you get the prod tone" and mean the same thing. Past those three, everyone's setup reflects their own job.
If you want the full rule syntax, including AND/OR matching and per-rule volume, the Chirpy guides cover it.