Applause Soundboard

Size does most of the work. A large hall applauding reads as triumph, a small room applauding reads as a slightly awkward corporate away day, and two isolated claps read as contempt. The sarcastic slow clap is the one people take most often, because it does something no amount of writing can do in the same half second. Sus clapping is the Among Us era's version of the same joke.

The laugh track is the oldest trick on the board and the least honest. A sound engineer named Charles Douglass built a machine for it in the early 1950s, loaded it with real laughter recorded elsewhere, and guarded the contents so closely that barely anyone outside his family ever saw inside. Lay it over a silence and the silence retroactively becomes a punchline. Lay it over bad news and something faintly sinister happens instead, which is the more interesting use.

Celebration gets its own corner. There is a confetti pop, the Times Square countdown, children cheering, and a studio audience going aww at something small and defenceless. Crab Rave is here too: Noisestorm released it through Monstercat on 1 April 2018 as an April Fools' joke, and the internet promptly adopted it as the official sound of good news, usually about someone else's misfortune.

Football supplies the loudest celebration humans currently make. Cristiano Ronaldo has said the SIUUU is simply the Spanish si, meaning yes, picked up during his Real Madrid years and stretched past breaking point, and the extended goooool call belongs to the Latin American commentary tradition. Press anything to hear it. Each sound page carries a free MP3 and an embed code, with no account at any stage.