![]() ![]() He is a remarkable and fascinating character, a composer, sound designer, software engineer, photographer, and polterzeitgeist (as he calls himself). I was therefore excited to have the chance to interview the composer of the chimes, Jim Reekes. ![]() If all the music we listen to is bound by a series of set frequencies, then surely the way to make an aural impact is to place one’s sounds outside these numbers? And Apple’s start-up chimes are incredibly successful at expressing the company’s identity in a single musical chord-thinking outside the box is definitely part of their core identity. Its most recent variant is neither an F major chord (F4 is 349.2 Hz) nor an F♯ major chord (369.99 Hz) the F of the Apple chime is somewhere in between the two. It’s not a C chord, an A chord, or a D chord. One clue to its singularity is that it’s out of tune. It has a strikingly unique sound that most of us instantly recognize, though few can explain why it is, after all, just one simple synthesizer chord. ![]() The company is Apple, and the genius aural logo is the start-up chime of an Apple Mac computer. If the world standardized fabric colors, would you not dye your T-shirts shades in between these set colors, giving your brand unique recognition? With this in mind, I’ve held on to an unproved theory: that one global tech giant has exploited our unfamiliarity with such long-forgotten frequencies in order to create an instantly recognizable aural logo for its brand. All rights reserved.īecause of an internationally standardized allocation of named pitches to set frequencies, we have jettisoned the vast majority of other frequencies into musical oblivion (in Western music at least). Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. Excerpted from What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency by Richard Mainwaring. ![]()
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