4 ms·
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 techni
by Dewie 13y ago
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...).
- mikeash 13y agoI 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.
- sp332 13y agoIt'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 13y ago> 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 13y agoThe 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 13y ago> 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.
- anigbrowl 13y agoAuditioning a bunch of presets ain't that hard either. His primary musical insight was to keep it simple rather than try to sex it up too much.