Mechanical keyboard simulator

What you are hearing

A mechanical key makes two separate events: the switch doing its job, and the keycap hitting bottom on the plate and case. This simulator builds both from scratch every time you press a key. Nothing is a recording. Each sound is a short burst of noise shaped by filters plus a handful of decaying tones, the way a struck object rings.

• Linear: the stem slides straight down. All you hear is the bottom-out, a faint spring and the return.
• Tactile: a small bump partway down. You get a soft rub a fraction of a second before the strike.
• Clicky: a separate click mechanism snaps at the actuation point, then the key bottoms out. It is the loud one, and also clicks quietly on the way back up.

The board setting changes the body of the sound. Thocky puts the weight in the low frequencies (a muffled, wooden knock), Clacky pushes it up high (a crisp, plasticky snap), and Balanced sits between them. The spacebar and Enter are bigger keys with metal stabilisers, so they ring lower, last longer and carry a tiny rattle, just like the real thing.

Why no two keystrokes sound the same

Real boards are uneven: a key near the edge of the plate rings differently from one in the middle, and you never hit two keys with exactly the same force. The Variation slider controls how much of that unevenness you hear. At zero every press is identical, which gets robotic fast. Around the middle, each key keeps its own slight pitch (the A key always sounds a little different from L) and each strike varies a little in force.

Things to try

• Type the same sentence with Linear + Thocky and then Clicky + Clacky. They are about as far apart as keyboards get.
• Turn off the key-up sound and notice how much of the "texture" of typing comes from keys springing back.
• Hold a key down. Nothing repeats, because a real switch only fires once per press, even when the computer repeats the letter.
• Compare the three switches back to back on the keyboard sound test, or let the ASMR typing page type by itself.

Limits worth knowing

This plays sounds only while this page is open and focused. It doesn't hook into other apps or your whole computer, and it can't. Browsers don't allow that, and that's a good thing. Phone keyboards don't report which physical key you pressed, so on a phone every letter gets a regular key sound, while space, Enter and delete get their own. Sound starts after your first tap or key press, because browsers keep pages silent until you interact with them.

The sounds are synthesized approximations of switch types, not copies of any brand or model. If you are choosing a real keyboard, recordings of that exact board are the better reference.