Why does my Mac go "whoosh" sporadically during the day?

Question

Occasionally my MacBook Pro makes the "whoosh" sound. It is the same one you you hear when dragging an icon off the dock and it goes "poof".

I never notice anything different.

What is it doing?

Solution 1

Do you use iChat or Messages? The same noise is used to indicate one of your buddies has signed out.

Solution 2

the swoosh sounds can be found by right clicking on ichat in the application folder and selecting show package content then go into contents then resources and its "buddy logging in.aiff" and "buddy logging out.aiff"

Solution 3

Do you use apple mail?

If so, it could be an email being sent and playing the sent email sound.

Comments

[Corey Floyd]

Wow, thats cryptic. I never even realized. I switch back and forth between Adium. Thanks.

[Kyle Cronin]

The Mail send sound is similar to the dock removal sound, but the iChat buddy sign off is the exact same.

[Sampson]

Always impressive to see somebody diagnose a question involving sound-effects :)

[Corey Floyd]

Yeah, thats more shwoooooowwwhhh. ha.

[Kyle Cronin]

Funny story: I had the same problem with Adium - I couldn't figure out where those sounds were coming from until I finally realized that it was supposed to be a duck quacking (or something).

[Alexis Hirst]

lol yeah i suppose it is :P

[Adam Davis]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! It was driving me crazy. Found via google search "my mac keeps on making wooshing noises" (hoping to push it up the search rankings for other hapless souls experiencing this problem!)

[AlienWebguy]

Oh man you're a saint. That was bugging me for an hour and I couldn't find a way to search for it haha "mac whoosh alert" finally brought me here :)

[Andrew]

As I could only hear this very quietly I originally thought it was the sound of files finishing copying. This drove me crazy. However after playing the iChat sound just now, this is definitely it and it is now disabled. Thanks :)

[Talent Developer]

This was perfect! I googled "find what app is making sound mac" by the way. Yay for google and superuser.com. WOOSH!