I was changing the sounds on my computer today, and realized what a drag is was.
I m often not at my computer 100% of the time, even though it is on, and so i
need alerts to tell me when i have a new email or IM message, or for other reasons.

Anyway, I got thinking about why there is no gnome sound theme available, you
can change the individual files for notifications etc in preferences > sounds,
but this isn't great, I really don't want to go through and select each file.
What i really want is to download a theme of gnome-look.org or something
similar, and just drag it onto the theme manager, and let it install all the
files for me.

The big trouble with this right now is there is no specification that I know of
for desktop sounds. I may be wrong here.

Then I got thinking a little more, about the tango project. This has been great,
it not only creating a detailed specification allowing applications to share
common icons, i want the same play button on all my media applications!, but it
also provides guidance on the design of icons, how to use shadows or colours for
instance.

So what had this got to do with sounds files? Well I had a thought that it would
be really cool if a similar effort sound be set up for sounds on computers. For
computer newbies, sounds can be a great way to provide feedback on their
actions, making the gulf between a real world action action and its results on
screen seem smaller from a user perspective. 

So I am proposing the bango project, why bango? well, sounds like tango for one
thing, and bango - kinda like making a noise with the bang part. Mind you, i am
open to suggestions for the name :)

What would this project do? Well for one thing provide useful guidance on how to
match events on the screen to sounds. How should someone create a sound event
for an email arriving, or for when an application crashes, or when a user logs in. 

The project should also be responsible for carrying our usability testing on a
range of users. Making sure these sounds themes enhance the users computing
experience.

Most importantly however, the group should work with freedesktop.org to produce
a specification for sounds themes, similar to the tango project. This will allow
the project to span multiple desktop environments like tango. If a developer
wanted a sound for a particular event for their app, say the email arriving
again, just use the notification-email.flac file.

The group should also be responsible for promoting the use of open codecs for
the sounds files, ogg or flac for example.

So why all the bother? Well because I feel it would make the life of people
migrating to open source software like Linux that little bit easier. Having
common consequences for actions can allow the user to bridge semantically
similar actions, which may be syntactically different. 

Anyway, this is really just me putting this idea out there, maybe there's
similar projects right now, i dunno, but i guess let the community decide if
this is important enough to be considered.