Making Claude Code beep when it needs you

Marlon Barcarol — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:14:41 +0000

While Claude Code works, I switch to other things. Too often I came back to find it had finished long ago, or had been sitting on a permission prompt for ten minutes waiting for a yes.

I wanted two sounds:

A gentle one when Claude finishes a reply.
A different one when Claude needs me.

This setup is for macOS.

How to do it

Add this to ~/.claude/settings.json. That's the user-level file, so it applies to every project. If the file already has settings, merge the hooks key in rather than replacing the file.

{
  "hooks": {
    "Notification": [
      {
        "matcher": "permission_prompt|idle_prompt|elicitation_dialog",
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "afplay -v 0.05 /System/Library/Sounds/Hero.aiff 2>/dev/null || true",
            "async": true
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "Stop": [
      {
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "afplay -v 0.05 /System/Library/Sounds/Blow.aiff 2>/dev/null || true",
            "async": true
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

That's it. Claude Code picks up the change without a restart.

What it does

Stop runs every time Claude finishes a reply. It plays the Blow sound.

Notification runs when Claude needs you, and plays the Hero sound. The matcher limits it to three cases:

permission_prompt: Claude is waiting for you to approve a tool, and the prompt has waited about six seconds.
idle_prompt: Claude finished about 60 seconds ago and you haven't typed since.
elicitation_dialog: Claude is asking you a question.

afplay is the command-line audio player built into macOS. -v sets the volume from 0 to 1. The built-in sounds live in /System/Library/Sounds/, so you can swap Blow and Hero for Glass, Tink, Pop, Purr and others.

"async": true plays the sound in the background, so it never slows Claude down. 2>/dev/null || true stops a failed sound from showing up as a hook error.

Gotchas

The sounds are loud. I started at 0.4 and ended up at 0.05.
The idle sound waits about a minute. It only plays if you haven't typed since Claude finished. Typing in the terminal resets the timer.
In auto mode, you'll get few permission prompts. Most of your Hero sounds will come from the idle timer.
Test a sound on its own with afplay -v 0.05 /System/Library/Sounds/Hero.aiff, before putting it in a hook.
Use /hooks in Claude Code to review your hooks or turn one off.

To explore further

To get notified on your phone too, add a command to the Notification hook that sends a push through a service like ntfy, Pushover or a Telegram bot.

DEV Community: Marlon Barcarol

Making Claude Code beep when it needs you

How to do it

What it does

Gotchas

To explore further