Friday, September 23, 2005 |
15:21 - Is that a bong-g? ...Oh, you have asthma? All right, move along...
http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/tiny-music-makers-pt-4-mac-startup.html
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Here's an interesting little article on the origins of the current Mac startup chime, first introduced on a 1991 Quadra, and composed by Jim Reekes, an engineer in the trenches who surreptitiously dropped it into the ROM:
After I changed the startup sound (which required much persuasion and working around the system) the ROM engineers continued changing it with each new machine. Some of them were weak, such as the Stanley Jordon guitar strum used on the first PowerMacs. I objected to it, because that sound had no "power". The engineer wasn't a recording engineer, and not familiar enough with audio. The sound was hallow and without depth. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, I heard he wanted only one sound for all Macs. He wanted the "good one" which was the one I created. At least that's how I heard the story, and I was still working there at the time."
The article also links to MacTracker, a little app that I've had installed for a long time—it has the startup chimes for every Mac ever made, as well as the long-vanished "Death Chimes". Just wait'll you hear those: they're the saddest things I've ever heard, like an attention chime in the Airport of the Damned—and I can just imagine them haunting my dreams if I were a Mac programmer back in the 80s. (Especially that one model where the Death Chime, in its final incarnation before being retired, is a car screeching into a wall.)
The part of this article that someone was initially showing me, though, was this cover of "Stranger in Moscow" done by Transformer di Roboter, who used the startup chime as the ongoing bass line. The result is something that sounds to me like a cross between Dirty Vegas and Katamari Damacy, and it works really well. Definitely a keeper, I think.
This is the kind of thing that people outside the Mac community probably see as making about as much sense as collecting Magic cards; but for those within it, all this lore and pop-culture is as much a part of the computing experience as the startup chime itself. Although I wonder: since the advent of the nigh-crashless Mac OS X, has the chime lost some of its mystique, becoming less and less ingrained into people's minds as part of their daily lives, now that we hear it so seldom anymore?
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