Boot up your computer. If you’re the owner of one of the more than two hundred million Macs sold, what’s the first thing you hear when you start or restart your machine? That sound tells you you’ve held down the power button long enough to get things going. And the fact that it’s there means you don’t even have to look at your computer to know it’s working right.
It’s not just executional feedback. What does that sound make you feel? Refreshed? At ease? Comforted, even? On your way to productivity? This is what I refer to as a brand-navigation sound. It’s a branded, ownable sound—it could only be a Mac—that is both functional and emotional and gives you a lot of valuable information in just a few seconds.
But Apple’s start-up sound wasn’t always so Zen. For a while, the sound of Apple was the sound of something going horribly wrong, a combination of notes that early-eighteenth-century music theorists and composers called the devil’s interval—a tritone. It’s any two tones that are three whole steps apart and played at the same time, like middle C plus the F# above it.
It’s disconcerting, provoking a feeling of agitation and anxiety. So irritating was this combination of notes that tritones were thought in Gregorian times to invoke evil incarnate. Tritones were all but banned in early religious music. And yet, there was a loud tritone, kicking off your experience with an early Macintosh. It wasn’t the experience a customer wanted. It wasn’t what Apple wanted to give them either.
https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mac_OldStartup.mp3
Jim Reekes, the guy who spotted this problem, is a big reason why you love your Mac, even after it crashes, and the first Macs crashed a lot. The son of an early Apple employee and an informal student of all sorts of uses of sound, Reekes started working at Apple as an engineer in 1988.
Steve Jobs had been ousted from Apple three years earlier, and Jim started his twelve-year career at Apple during the rudderless period that he calls a “turd sandwich.”
Reekes describes sound back then as “yet another fucked-up project at Apple.” There were a whole host of problems with sound, not the least of which was how it…sounded. “One of the things I wanted to do was replace all of the old sounds,” he says. He recorded his own car alarm for one project; he recorded a coworker saying quack for the famous sound that made its way to early Macs. And when he began rewriting the computer’s sound manager, he winced every time he heard that start-up sound.
https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mac_Quack.mp3
“It’s not just me that thinks it’s bad. It’s bad,” he says of the sound he sought to supplant, the tritone. “It’s been bad throughout history. It’s literally the most dissonant sound you can make.”
And whether you realize it or not, your computer’s start-up sound frames the experience you go on to have with it. It’s a symbol of what’s to come—Reekes calls it an earcon (analogous to an icon). This tiny sound leads off all the connections that your computer enables—to other machines, to worlds of data and knowledge, to people. When a sound like this is played in the right situation at the right time, it’s incredibly potent. Reekes set out to design a Mac sound that would spark a magical experience.
“I thought, I gotta have this meditative sound,” Reekes says. “I used to joke about it being a palate cleanser for the ears.” He had to design it to fit a lot of different machines (Apple was considering many versions back then) and all of the various configurations where the sound would play—tiny speakers on the cheapest line of Macs, the beefier sound coming out of the (then) new Quadra series, even professional speakers in actual music studios hooked up to Macs.
He ended up with a big two-handed C-major chord. It’s in stereo. It fades back and forth, left to right. There’s a bit of reverb in it. It’s played by a bunch of string sounds and even what Jim describes as a “chiffy” bamboo chute sound. “It’s a calm sound. And I knew that people understood C major, even nonmusicians. And it’d still feel interesting to people who are in very good studios. I was trying to reach a very broad audience with the intent and type of emotion I was trying to evoke.”
https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mac_NewStartup.mp3
When Reekes put it on a few of the early prototype machines, his superiors balked. It’s a common reaction from people who don’t quite get the magnitude of the opportunity in sound—there are still a lot of innovative people who need convincing, even though they feel the impact of sound daily. “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Reekes’s bosses told him. “No one would let me change it,” he says. “So I had to sneak it in at night.”
He went into the office in the wee hours, changed the code, inserted his sound, and eventually enlisted the support of one of his superiors, who looked the other way when others protested about the change. In the end, the computers shipped with Reekes’s sound. It was a coup at a company that’s since become known for its iron grip on design.
The Macintosh Quadra 700 came out in 1991. The reviewer of the machine in the now defunct computer bible Byte magazine wrote: “I knew I was in for something great when I heard it turn on.”
“I’m like, ‘Exactly! Victory!’ ” Reekes says. “That’s exactly what I was trying to do!”
Lots of people at Apple subsequently tried to change Jim’s start-up sound, he says, and he always argued against it. “It’s like a logo, you don’t keep changing it! Change isn’t bad, it’s just that it needs to be better.” Although no one has definite proof of this, Jim believes Steve Jobs himself finally fended off any alterations to it when he came back to Apple in 1996.
That sound has remained essentially unchanged since then. Only minor tweaks have been made, despite numerous operating system and feature alterations, lots of new hardware, and tons of icon and font changes. No matter what Apple innovations come up, the start-up sound stays mostly the same and brings its customers the same satisfying bong when they first turn on their new Macs.
Jim innately understood that this particular sound was a strategic imperative—it wasn’t just a tactical decision. It had to project the Apple brand personality, and because of consistent use over generations of the product, the sound is a lasting symbol of Apple’s “think different” philosophy. It’s synonymous with the entire product experience.
Excerpt from The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 21, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Man Made Music, Inc. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
For an interview with Joel Beckerman, click here.
