
How I Created the Iconic iPhone Sound - anewcolor
http://jacklinstudios.com/docs/making-of-158-marimba.html
======
Centigonal
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!

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
Sorry to be that person... but it's actually a perfect fifth, not a third.

~~~
Centigonal
Oh man, my ears need work...

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afandian
Brilliant. Did I miss something or does the article not actually give us the
sound he ended up with?

~~~
jpatokal
Yup, but here you go:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoJUYQk_FMI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoJUYQk_FMI)

~~~
afandian
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.

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oftenwrong
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". 
    
    

[http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/all-this-week-tiny-
mu...](http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/all-this-week-tiny-music-
makers.html)

~~~
alexfringes
"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.

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lysium
Nice read! I never noticed that the 'disc burning completed' and 'installation
succeeded' events use the same sound.

I like how the author is not like "I could have made so much money if I
licensed it!".

------
alanfalcon
Fascinating!

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).

My sound:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6692701/Sound%20Test.m4a](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6692701/Sound%20Test.m4a)

~~~
pestaa
Reminds me of operating system errors from the 90s. :)

------
jcurbo
Great article. Reminds me of this awesome breakdown of the music from Super
Mario Bros.:
[http://www.losdoggies.com/archives/1302](http://www.losdoggies.com/archives/1302)

------
shinratdr
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.

------
joezydeco
Great story. Now can we _please_ , seven years into the existence of the
iPhone, _please_ can we get some new ringtones into the default library?

"Digital" gives me post-traumatic seizures now. Swear to god every other
iPhone I hear is using it.

~~~
philwelch
When you have an iPhone for long enough and use it as your alarm clock, you
even start to develop aversions to some of the ringtones.

~~~
khalidmbajwa
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.

~~~
sjwright
_Then put your little hand in mine, there ain 't no hill or mountain we can't
climb. Babe... I got you babe..._

------
donut
In the episode of the excellent podcast "99% Invisible", there is a story of
how the iOS unlocking sound was created:

[http://99percentinvisible.org/post/3230995265/episode-15-the...](http://99percentinvisible.org/post/3230995265/episode-15-the-
sound-of-the-artificial-world)

------
brendoncrawford
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.

~~~
cardamomo
My co-worker's office phone is a real tritone
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

~~~
widdershins
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.

~~~
cardamomo
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.

Background reading: "Musical Consonance and Dissonance: A Cultural Criterion"
([http://www.jstor.org/stable/426253](http://www.jstor.org/stable/426253))

------
arocks
Just shows how hard computer-generated music was, at one point in time. Today,
it is ubiquitous and requires almost no technical computer knowledge.

~~~
jacquesm
Computer generated music was hard when Kraftwerk did it.

~~~
anigbrowl
Quite. This is from 1983:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt3p-F2x7rY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt3p-F2x7rY)

~~~
kalleboo
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e11h73WhqK4)

~~~
anigbrowl
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkW8Ul7Q1I)

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crusso
_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? :)

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aa0
Seems like over engineering and a good reminder that stress can be avoided
through simplicity

~~~
icebraining
How so? He didn't sound stressed to me.

~~~
aa0
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

~~~
chaosphere2112
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).

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

------
philwelch
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.

------
tmuir
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.

~~~
micampe
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.

~~~
graeme
>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

\-----------

"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"..."

\------------

That's from the article. Seems like a very appropriate use of iconic to me.

~~~
jfarmer
100%!

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?

My money is on the latter.

------
beloch
I've always _hated_ that sound. Now I know who to blame!

------
Dewie
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...).

~~~
sp332
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.

~~~
Dewie
> 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.

~~~
biot
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?

~~~
Dewie
> 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.

