Behind the Story of the iPhone's Default Text Tone 102
An anonymous reader writes "In a fascinating post from Kelly Jacklin, the long time Apple software engineer details how he helped create the default text alert sound on the iPhone — a sound otherwise known as 'Tri-tone.' The history of the the pleasant text alert sound that we've all come to know and love stretches all the way back to 1998, nearly 10 years before the iPhone ever hit store shelves." Here's Jacklin's post.
I must be some kind of outlier (Score:2, Informative)
I can't for the life of me think of what the 'tri-tone' sounds like.
On the other hand, the Nokia tune [wikipedia.org] is possibly more well known than Mickey Mouse.
Here's the sound (Score:5, Informative)
is supposed to be. And it doesn't seem to playable at or even linked
to from any of the story links.
So here it is [youtube.com].
Aaaaah, that one.
Re:Hardly Iconic (Score:3, Informative)
Oh he came up with it? Was that before or after Francisco Tarrega wrote in in 1902?
Not really a "tritone" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not really a "tritone" (Score:4, Informative)
The original quote from Jacklin's blog is:
I wanted a happy feel, so notes from the major scale, focussing on I, III, IV, V, and VIII (the octave).
But yes, it's clear that to the article writer 'octave' was simply a buzzword, and he didn't grasp the significance of the roman numerals. So he assumed that those numerals were different sorts of 'octaves'.