
Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy - cdvonstinkpot
http://www.noisemademedoit.com/dial-up-modem-slowed/
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lsb
This is rather disappointing. The dial-up modem sound is digitally created,
and a digital lengthening of each tone is much higher quality.

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timdorr
Yeah, they're attempting to do a time shift with some sort of echo-y dithering
going on. Since it's digital, no dithering is needed!

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jrockway
Indeed. The sound starts off with a dialtone slowed down 700x but pitch
adjusted. Guess what, that's exactly equivalent to the real dialone. (Instead
of recording it for 1 second, you record it for 700 seconds.)

This rest of the video continues in the same manner. It just doesn't make any
sense to me.

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Goladus
The point is less what it is than how one feels when it's heard. Sounds and
music are often perceived passively and subtly influence your feelings at the
moment, particularly the sort of "creepy music" the linked sound resembles
most closely.

If you are only analyzing the component noises there's a good chance you'll
miss the emotions evoked, similar to the way a joke isn't funny if you dwell
too much on the explanation.

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jws
Most of the time is the initial identification tones, followed by the line
equalization phase where the modems are sorting out the exact response of the
line. The sounds near the end that are sort of like white noise are the data
transfer.

Part of the creepy is that the modems are using pitches that are not
harmonically related. That is anti-musical (unless you are way out on the
fringes) and denies you the ability to pigeon hole the sounds.

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tintin
Even more amazing is Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch software that did the job!
<http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/>

~~~
JonnieCache
Indeed that is a particularly nice sounding time stretch algorithm.

It sounds like a crystal forest on saturn.

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babuskov
Any sound slowed 700% is creepy. It's just the human brain associating high-
pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice"
sounds, while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring,
otherwise associated with danger.

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Sharlin
No, this is stretched 700% without affecting the pitch:
<http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/>

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babuskov
I listened to it again, you're right. Sounds like a horror movie theme, maybe
that's what gives the creeps. Although I have to agree with many others in
this thread: it isn't _that_ creepy, I heard much better ones.

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jawns
If I slow something 50%, I would expect its speed to be halved. If I slow
something 100%, I would expect its speed to be zero. Not quite sure how you
can slow something by more than 100%.

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cheald
100% slowdown ("streched to 100% as long") would be half the speed. "Slowed
down 700%" in this case means "stretched to 700% of its original duration".

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jschulenklopper
Sounds similar to the 'keening' sounds that whales make. What would the whale
sounds speeded up to 700% decode to for a dial-up modem? :-)

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jedberg
It just made me sleepy, not creeped out.

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jrockway
Next week on Hacker News: "Hey guys, I took a picture of my cat this morning"

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Goladus
This is creative and unusual. Sound design is an interesting and relevant
topic.

~~~
rbanffy
Interesting, yes. Relevant to Hacker News... debatable.

But I agree with jrockway - pictures of cats should result in immediate
banning (unless it's something like <http://placekitten.com/>).

~~~
Goladus
> Relevant to Hacker News... debatable.

So debate. I have used sounds and music while hacking. I know video game
developers whose job title is "sound designer". This link, while not
particularly advanced or profound, still inspired me to think about creating
sounds in a way I hadn't before.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Seems well within the guidelines to me.

~~~
ddunkin
Exactly, this one link provoked me to try a few things myself and I learned a
few new things without even expecting it today.

I took this same app to other sounds (chainsaw, smoke detector) and it was all
technically interesting. The modem tone was still the most interesting to me.

Take modem negotiation to a frequency display and zoom in, and you can
actually see what the dual-tone in DTMF stands for. Heck, it looks like a
piano roll if you want to take it in that direction for inspiration. Translate
the row and column into a set of musical intervals and you'll be able to
figure out how to play basic songs on your touch-tone phone.

Just tell me this isn't cool: <http://imgur.com/sbtyY>

I just found the first modem sound I could find off Google. By looking at the
frequencies in the image, it is dialing 1-415-489-3565, which is still an
active Earthlink dial-up number.

Small posts like this drag me in directions like this all the time. It leads
me to questions I wouldn't have bothered with asking before today. This is
absolutely within the guidelines and I thank the submitter for the
enlightenment I received today.

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okamiueru
Also, Justin Bieber slowed 700% sounds like Sigur Ros.

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okamiueru
I should add: it wasn't an original comment, and it is a bit true.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M>

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konceptz
As one who ran a BBS and was constantly listening to these connections, I was
expecting(hoping) to hear something I could understand.

At 2x speed up I think I recognize this as a 56k negotiation. I started using
cable around that time so I can't tell the difference between x2 and K56.

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juiceandjuice
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the picture on that blog was derived
from a Shepard Fairey poster, which was derived from a Josef Müller-Brockmann
poster about noise titled 'Noise Control' in 1960:

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kzaoY-
eKntI/S-2gf01XkPI/AAAAAAAAAD...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kzaoY-
eKntI/S-2gf01XkPI/AAAAAAAAAD0/Vnzr0aeB708/s1600/M%C3%BCller-Brockmann-02.jpg)

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styluss
Reminds me of FUture Sound of London - Dead Cities

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exolab
Whales on a combination of LSD and steroids or extraterrestrials? Not sure...

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conorwade
Am I the only person who thinks the Lost intro music when they hear that?
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MiwoDpbcdk>

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jonsen
So this is what those 700%-faster-clocked-brain extraterrestrials get when
they are tuning in on earth.

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leak
I didn't find it creepy at all. What were they expecting to find when they
slowed it down?

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ar4s
Woke up a few minutes ago because I couldn't sleep (3:19). Hello Day!

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dag11
Not creepy.

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Goladus
I agree but it does sound like music used by movies intended to evoke
creepiness. It's because it sounds unnatural, far outside what we're used to
hearing. Compare with, say, the Blaster Beam used by Jerry Goldsmith in the
film _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Beam>

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dontstopnowbaby
Creepy? I've seen, heard, and tasted worse thanks to the internet

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Ygg2
For some reason it reminds me of Broken Saints.

