Distraction due to salient-but-irrelevant visual distractors during visual search is well established. Using a cross-modal adaptation of the additional-singleton paradigm, we investigated the generalisability of this classic effect to auditory distractors in the present study. In a series of experiments, participants reported whether a salient object (a tilted bar among a dense array of vertical bars) was present or absent, while an auditory distractor accompanied some trials. Contrary to expectations, no auditory distraction effect was observed. Auditory distraction failed to occur even when the distractor was presented as a rare oddball stimulus or additionally with a temporal advantage of 300 ms. Finally, when the auditory modality was made globally relevant, while still maintaining its irrelevance to the search task, we observed a distractor interference effect. Taken together, these results indicate that a highly efficient attention mechanism exists to block auditory distraction from interfering with visual tasks if the auditory modality is completely irrelevant. We call this phenomenon, the attentional earlid – since it works much the same way as the eyelid does in blocking irrelevant visual stimuli, but instead of being a physical barrier it is attentional.