How to silence a system sound on Windows 10
Windows 10 has an entire library of system sounds. These sounds are event specific e.g., if you try to close an app when the save dialog is open, you will hear a bell sound. Likewise, when you increase or decrease the sound from the volume icon/slider in the system tray, you hear a tri-tone play. If you find some, or all of these system sounds annoying/useless you can silence them. You can mute system sounds or silence a system sound, individually.
Mute system sounds
If you find all system sounds useless, you can mute them from the volume mixer. Right-click the volume icon in the system tray and select Volume Mixer.
On the Volume Mixer window, reduce the slider for System Sound to zero and you won’t hear any more system sounds. This will also silence the sound alert you get for new notifications.
Silence system sound
Right-click the volume icon in the system tray, and select Sounds from the menu. This will open the Sound window, with the Sound tab pre-selected.
This tab lists all sounds that the system plays. If you select a sound, and look at the Sounds dropdown at the very bottom, you will see when the sound plays. It may also be used for other events in addition to the one that it’s named after. When you have a sound selected, you will see a Play button next to the dropdown. Click it to hear the sound and figure out when it plays.
When you find the system sound that you want to silence, select it and open the Sound dropdown at the bottom. From the list of sounds, select None at the very top. Click Apply, and Ok.
When you open the Sounds dropdown you will see how extensive the sounds library is and these sounds are not used for just one event. A single sound can, and is, used for multiple events. When you silence a sound, you basically prevent it from playing at all. It doesn’t just turn off for the specific event that it is configured to run for.
This means that if you decide to silence a system sound, you should know what other events it might have an impact on and be careful. If a particular sound bothers you, you can change it to something else. You can select any other sound from the list and it will replace the one that’s originally configured.
