I know that technically this is the *visual* design group... but the audio theme for KDE has eben around since before 4.0 was even released and is starting to sound a bit tired, especially the login sound. The sad thing is that I can't say I've really come across any other theme that was really done better. Anyone else have any ideas or inspirations?

A couple I quite like, although I wouldn't suggest we couldn't make something that fit even better:
http://youtu.be/yZBTcTFXipw?t=1m17s
http://youtu.be/yZBTcTFXipw?t=10s

I've been giving this some thought too!

And yes we're "visual" but not JUST visual This is one of those topics that need to be talked about.

Personally I am all for an atonal audio theme - that is no discernable "song" but a sound scape instead (like rushing wind, tinkling wind chimes is a soundscape - having those noises play a song is not)

The topic of a new login sound has been discussed quite extensively on the kde-artists and -promo lists last May, you can read up on the discussion in the archive.
Many people in that discussion (me included) preferred a sound over a tune. Aaron Seigo suggested the sound of waves splashing onto a beach, which I think is quite nice. The discussion then died as the guy who originally proposed a new startup sound seemed to have got fed up with the debate.

Way back when the VDG started we had some chats about it - I have some friends here who work as musician and audio engineers with whom I've talked to about it. The issue is often that pure melodies are tiresome and often considered redundant after a while - they feel like a drawn out cliché.

But from a marketing perspective they are brilliant - because just like visual details being repeated a song can be reused to hammer in its meaning as "brand X" (take the Nokia ring tone for example). Now marketing isn't as big an issue to us but promo material on the other hand is - considering the importance of audio it still is a massively important issue (have you ever watched a cartoon without audio? Everything suddenly doesn't make sense or look unrealistic as part of the realism comes from the soundeffect of things and your brain just adds the images and the sound up to create a whole).

For Plasma Next, what needs to be considered is that we're aiming for a very specific theme if we could find a soft curving soundscape which can HINT to more things than just one specific object (like waves on a beach) we could do real wonders with it.
Same for system sounds - almost everyone turns them off now because they are simply too damn jarring. If we made soft, understated sounds instead (think facebook message sound, the Cinnamon desktops effect sounds or Gnome for that matter) we can create a situation where you WANT to keep them. Using the same design goals as the theme we can create a rather awesome whole.

I believe that in this area you can look at many examples that come from mobile devices. My Htc One for example has a beautiful opening melody. In fact really, thanks to the spread of mobile devices, many things you can take from them as an example.

I would opt for some ambient music sound. Windows 95 had login sound composed by legendary Eno. We could have something inspired by other ambient music classics, like Roach: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... roach&sm=3

I love the idea of ambient sounds for system events! For example, imagine hearing wind flowing gently though a wind chime singing out a subtle few notes when one logs into their system. Or some ambient breeze noise when a new email lands into your inbox.

Something like this could definitely add some class and should be included in the overarching goals of the VDG. Just my two cents.

Perhaps something like this could be inspirational:

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/New+Age+Ubuntu?content=141015

I just changed my login sound to use this. I like it