"Digital" gives me post-traumatic seizures now. Swear to god every other iPhone I hear is using 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.
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.
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.
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.
Iconic just means "instantly recognizable as X".
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):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ8sZXFN6jc
That should give you some idea of the audio effects possible on computers at the time. The Tri-Tone is child's play by comparison.
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.
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...).
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.
...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.
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!
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.
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".
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.
My sound: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6692701/Sound%20Test.m4a
I like how the author is not like "I could have made so much money if I licensed it!".
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.
http://99percentinvisible.org/post/3230995265/episode-15-the...
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? :)