Wow -- when I first opened up the article, I thought "it's just a major third and an octave, how could coming up with that possibly be interesting?"
While reading about the things he did, though, I realized that I do a lot of similar things (queueing up lots of combinations, throwing instruments at a line until something works) to achieve really simple results. I'd always chalked that up to "not being that great at programming/composing/what-have-you." I guess others go through that as well. That's reassuring!
In the end, it's artist's perception that matters. It's like a test suite for a program, which ensures that the end result works regardless of how well you write code (ignoring the maintenance and readability problems for a moment here). Whichever way you come up with a sound, it's your ear that will or will not allow it to pass through.
Some particular creative tactics can help, though—by providing more diverse, unexpected input, and/or optimizing for quicker iteration (allowing to test more variations in less time). Tuning your guitar differently, or using generative methods, as in the original post, are two examples.
Thanks! I could have found that if I'd really wanted. It just seemed like a major omission in the article! I did recognise the sound from that clip, but that article seemed constructed to prevent you from remembering it, featuring so many very close examples that aren't actually it.
The blog Music Thing once did a short series of posts called "Tiny Music Makers" that gave some background to the creation process of famous small sounds.
My favorite quote from it, about the Intel Inside chimes:
In less than three seconds, they wanted "tones that evoked
innovation, trouble-shooting skills and the inside of a
computer, while also sounding corporate and inviting".
"Corporate and inviting" must have been the precursor to those fake processor plant campaigns they did back in the day. Those really made me feel like this company was a warm, loving bunch.
I'm so far removed from having any musical knowledge or ability, but I was faced with a similar challenge of creating a small sound (in my case for Snake Quest, a game I was helping to create, coincidentally also in 1999). And what did I do?
Now a normal person would have just started playing around on the keyboard.
Guess I'm a normal person. Sat down at a midi keyboard I'd connected to my iMac (I had never-realized ambitions of using that keyboard to learn to play) and just hit a few keys at random. Then apparently added an awful clashing reverb effect (IIRC I also used SoundEdit at the time).
This sound has a personal history for me, I would always turn up my speakers full blast so I could play games in another room and know when my CD was finished burning. When Tri-Tone shook the house, it was ready.
I was a little disappointed to see it in iOS as I would have chosen it for that exact purpose, but now it had the caveat of causing everyone to reach for their phone including me.
Applies to ANY Alarm tune. Rule # 1 of Alarm Tunes: Never ever use a song you really like as an Alarm Tune. You will hate it for the rest of your existence.
Re: Digital - you must be part of an interesting demographic, of the 500+ iPhones we have at work, I've never heard the Digital ringtone used by anybody for any purpose.
I had an boss that was always running around in my area and his phone would go off every few minutes. Now I think it's just selection bias when I hear it.
I'm currently in a country where there are still a lot of Nokia users. It's literally a vacation to hear the old jingle again.
Is anyone else annoyed by the inaccurate use of the name "tri-tone"? I'm guessing a real tritone would be far too anxious as a phone sound for most western ears.
My co-worker's office phone is a real tritone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone). Considering that her desk is right next to mine, I find it incredibly jarring to hear that interval blaring in my ear whenever she gets a call.
...but in the end, I think you're right. I've been trained by Western music to think of the tritone as anxious or dissonant.
Your anxiety at the tritone is not just a culturally learned response - as the Wikipedia article you linked explains, the harmonic ratios in a tritone really are mathematically 'dissonant' when compared to, say, a perfect fifth or major third.
A mathematical explanation of consonance and dissonance in music is appealing for its simplicity, but it is somewhat of a reductionist approach to understanding listeners' experience of music. There are many elements of the European musical tradition that, though they sound consonant to our ears, cannot be explained on mathematical grounds. The minor mode and the minor triad are notable examples. A more subtle and insidious case is that of equal temperament.
I don't know if the tritone in the ring grandparent comment mentions is a melodic (2 notes in sequence) or harmonic interval (2 notes at the same time). In any case here is how a tritone interval sounds:
Computer generated music wasn't that hard at the time the author's writing about. To be honest the process the author describes is just about the simplest there is in computer music: choose a sampler instrument, pick a sequence of notes.
Consider that Aphex's Windowlicker was a created at around the same time as the sound the author made, and it was an entirely computer sequenced track (with lots of effects programmed in the SuperCollider audio programming language):
And this is from 1974, one year before the Altair 8800 ("widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e11h73WhqK4
Yeah...but I don't think that's really a good point of comparison, as all the electronic sounds on there are analog rather than computer-generated. The actual recording was tracked on tape but played conventionally from keyboards, analog sequencers, drum pads etc. There's no sampling going on here, except insofar as tape edits are equivalent to sampling.
I'm being pednatic here, it's just that I'm an electronic musician myself so there's a very bright line between analog and digital (computer) methods for me. By the way, you will probably really enjoy this short documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkW8Ul7Q1I
Not at all. This was in 1998, he had numerous options available. For some reason he went about it in the most convoluted fashion imaginable. But the smartest decisions were the ones that took the least time.
You notice he went with a fairly limited set of notes; if you're not a musician take my word for it that these are notes guaranteed to sound good together, because a) they're a succession of whole-number frequency ratios and b) they are also in the ratio of the first few Fibonacci numbers, and the human brain really, really likes hearing those basic tones recombined.
All the stuff with LISP & perl seems like a complete and utter waste of time to me. Even the author says he was 'geeking out' - presumably to avoid putting his musical ego on the line.
It would have been vastly simpler and easier to open up a MIDI sequencer (choosing from one of the many available on the market, and almost every musician has at least one installed), and either play in a bunch of chords and then offset the notes, or gone into the event list editor, tossed in the first few combinations, and then cut-n-pasted the rest.
There isn't anything wrong with doing it the way he did - it seems like he wanted to push his personal musical taste to the background, and use a deliberative approach to combine and play the notes without any possible musical bias. I have algorithmic musical software that I sometimes use for the same reason, especially when I'm trying to learn something or break out of a musical habit. But there were many less time-consuming ways of achieving the same result.
But there was no need to do things this way in 1998. Even then it would have looked like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
same "completion" sound in the installer, for the sound that happens when an install completes
Yeah, damn them for that. I remember checking my phone on several occasions when background installs had finished. Eventually I had the installer up when the sound went off and I had a nice WTF? :)
He didn't, right. The story is a good example of how in depth some design decisions can get when desire for perfection kicks in - as programmers that focus on products, we have to realize that purity is always a stresser of we don't go with our gut. OP could have just played 3 notes on a midi keyboard instead of coding with all the conversion and Perl and whatnot. He got what he wanted and its might cool but doing the same process for every design decision is going to stress anyone out in due time
I'd rather spend the time getting things Right. I'm a software guy, and I'd much rather return to code that's well organized and thought out. It takes time a iteration to get to well-designed code.
When I get outside my area of expertise (which is solving problems with code), I still like to spend time making things feel like they were professionally made. Doing that lends me credibility, make my own products more appealing for purchase, and give me lots of personal satisfaction.
To this specific story, even if the guy kept all the different music theory note sequence combinations in his head, he's bound to forget which he played and which he didn't. Hell, wrote a couple nested loops and be done with it. Go back after the few minutes it takes for the audio to render and listen to every combination, knocking out the bad ones, re-listening to the others honing in on a good one ... Sounds like a good automated/iterative balance to me. I'd have even automated the file slicing and put a text interface on it: play a sound, ask for Y/N input, keep looping the remaining Y responses ...
He spent 2 hours and created a sound that causes entire rooms of people to pat their pockets; I'm pretty sure it would have actually taken longer to try out samples by hand (and evaluate each one as you go).
The thing is, he could have done the same thing in about 20 minutes with a MIDI sequencer. The sound doesn't cause people to pat their pockets; the reason this sound works well as a ringtone is because it's easily recognizable while being sufficiently bland and short not to be outright annoying.
Apparently someone else at Apple shared his conclusion that the marimba was the best instrument for this kind of alert, since the default ringtone for receiving a call is "Marimba", featuring a slightly longer tune.
Iconic? Thats equivalent to saying the Beatles were iconic by coming up with a catchy band name. These things become part of collective consciousness because they are widely disseminated, repeated, an generally unoffensive. There is no special sauce in the name Beatles, nor in this sound. Both were elevated by other unrelated factors, the Beatles' music, and Apples prevalance in the computer marketplace. As long as they didnt name themselves The Motherfuckers, The Beatles would have been successful by just about any name. As long as it wasnt something offensive or grating, the sound of a cd finishing burning/phone notifying would be recognizable by millions, regardless of the sound itself.
The word makes you upset only because you assign to it an overly positive meaning it doesn't have. Iconic is close in meaning to recognizable. This sound—just like the Nokia one ten years ago, the Windows or Mac startup sounds, the Intel jingle, even the modem dial sequence—is iconic because when you hear it you associate it with a specific product, so it serves as an icon, a representation of something else.
I remember in 2002 I was watching a movie in a London theater, and the lights went dark, and the movie was just about to start, and... that Nokia sound went off. The entire theater groaned, "AWWWWWW". And then, another went off, and another, and several more, until it was an absolute cacophony of Nokia sounds.
Then the Nokia logo came on screen, accompanied by the words, "Please silence your cell phones."
The groans turned into sincere chuckles.
That was one of the earliest pre-movie reminders, and still one of the best. And it only worked (full circle here), because that Nokia sound was so iconic.
>The word makes you upset only because you assign to it an overly positive meaning it doesn't have.
Well said. In situations like this, I always refer to Oxford dictionary. It's included in spotlight on Macs.
Iconic: of, relating to, or of the nature of an icon
Icon: a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something
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"Time goes by, and this sound becomes iconic, showing up in TV shows and movies, and becoming international short-hand for "you have a text message"..."
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That's from the article. Seems like a very appropriate use of iconic to me.
What I try to do is give folks the benefit of the doubt. Charity über Alles.
Rather than read "iconic" and jump to the first conclusion I have, I might try in earnest to read and understand what someone wrote as they intended it to be read.
In this case, if he meant "iconic" in the sense that The Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Elis Presley are iconic then, the tone of the article is off. It's very humble. There were no sour grapes, but rather a kind of happy surprise when he heard that a sound he made years ago was used on the iPhone. It sure doesn't seem like he was puffing himself up.
What's more likely, then? That he meant "iconic" in the Beatles sense or that it didn't occur to him that some folks reading this article might take "iconic" in a way he didn't intend?
It seems a lot of posters in this thread share that same positive meaning, which lends creedence to the definition. There are several posts that interpret this sound as the optimal sound for its associated task, as if it would have been less recognizeable if it had not been a marimba, or that particular group of intervals. My point is that this is a conflation of correlation and causation.
>Iconic? Thats equivalent to saying the Beatles were iconic by coming up with a catchy band name.
No, it's not, and yes, it's iconic.
>There is no special sauce in the name Beatles, nor in this sound.
Who said there has to be "special sause" for it to be iconic? The word just means "instantly recognizable as meaning X".
>As long as it wasnt something offensive or grating, the sound of a cd finishing burning/phone notifying would be recognizable by millions, regardless of the sound itself.
And if that happened, it would be iconic too, instead of this one.
I don't see the big deal with coming up with an incredibly simple ascending arpeggio with a percussive kind of timbre. It's not like you need any kind of technique or technology in particular. I'd think it is "iconic" only because it is heard so often and that it has an instrumentation that stands out enough. The melody doesn't sound so iconic anymore when it is featured thousands of guitar arpeggios.
Or was the point that actually making a specific sound with computers alone used to be hard?
What's more interesting to me is the iconic ring tones - the mellow Nokia ringtone taken from Francisco Tárrega - Gran Vals, and the incredibly annoying-sounding Sony Ericsson ringtone.
I guess the lesson is that a lot of roads leads to the same place, even if the road is over a big mountain with a glacier instead of driving around it (using Lisp to permute three notes...).
I don't think he's saying that this sound is at all special outside of the context in which it's found. He's simply amazed that his work has become so incredibly widespread, and talks about how he created it. Nothing about this story implies the work itself was something particularly special.
It's interesting because the constraint on the project wasn't "I want an incredibly simple ascending arpeggio with a percussive kind of timbre." It was, "something simple that would grab the user's attention... cut through the clutter of noise in a home or office." Sifting through all possible sounds to find one that does the best job is not that easy.
> It was, "something simple that would grab the user's attention... cut through the clutter of noise in a home or office."
Sounds like a good job for a percussive instrument... I guess I don't see the big deal, outside of being a cute back-story on what was probably more about being at the right place at the right time.
The old adage "If you haven't got anything nice to say..." applies here. When someone else posts a short explanation of how they created something, why do you feel the need to deride it as being "not a big deal"? Does dismissing the work of other people help you feel better about yourself?
> When someone else posts a short explanation of how they created something, why do you feel the need to deride it as being "not a big deal"?
Because the details of how it was made doesn't matter much, since you could bang on kitchen appliances and come up with a similar simple fraction-of-a-second jingle. Though I have conceded that it is a nice enough story for historical purposes. But hardly anything more than that.
> Does dismissing the work of other people help you feel better about yourself?
This is just childish, emotionally charged rhetoric.
While reading about the things he did, though, I realized that I do a lot of similar things (queueing up lots of combinations, throwing instruments at a line until something works) to achieve really simple results. I'd always chalked that up to "not being that great at programming/composing/what-have-you." I guess others go through that as well. That's reassuring!