An addendum to the audio technology post below, Kumo points to a researcher with lots of work on sound in common UI widgets.
7/2/2001
9:41:20 AM
IRT.org offers a tutorial on the FlashSound API, an excellent solution for embellishing your pages with sound effects but without interfering with page load and degrading gracefully in boundary cases. The javascript library comes from Sonify.org where I found an interesting thread on the use of sound to create a spatial sense and the technical oomph to carry it off.
Speaking of flash, if you're into it or would like to be, a regular haunt ought to be FlashKit for oodles of open source flash movies. Speaking of sound, streaming audio was a fixture of my earliest web creations (@ '96) and there's still plenty of my contributions at WRLC though back then I just linked to SugarMegs.