I'm trying to understand how/if I can output sound on my PC from an Arduino.
I don't mean by playing a WAV file or anything like that, a beep is what I'm looking for.
I've tried the "\a" but that doesn't work and apparently tone() is for a speaker connected directly to the arduino uno.
I'm trying to understand how/if I can output sound on my PC from an Arduino.
Basically you can't.
All you can do from the arduino is to send your PC a message through the serial port. Then something on the PC has to receive that message and trigger the sound. So you need some sort of code running on the PC.