What is the purpose of canberra-gtk-module?

Question

I see a lot of questions regarding the "Failed to load canberra-gtk-module" and got curious on what the purpose of this module actually is. Since the google searches only points to questions on how to fix it, I was hoping someone here knew the answer.

Solution

From the package description of libcanberra-gtk-module:

translates GTK+ widgets signals to event sounds

GTK+ is a toolkit for creating GUIs, most of the default Ubuntu desktop, and the GNOME desktop environment, is developed using it. libcanberra is a library for playing sounds. libcanberra-gtk-module, then, is the module that takes GUI events from GTK+ (like pressing a button, or minimizing a window) and plays some configured sound.

The error message commonly seen maybe a result of these bugs:

• #872172 - libcanberra-gtk0 should recommend Gtk2 and Gtk3 module to fix: Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
• #888779 - Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-moduleanberra-gtk-module" (sic)
• #689434 - Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory