We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: ringtone

  • Commodore PET startup sound (again)

    I’d posted the commodore pet startup chime before without comment, but last weekend’s goings-on at World of Commodore 2025 have made me revisit it.

    Josh Bensadon had brought some very silly little devices he’d made that played the startup chime when you pressed a button. They contained a small PIC chip programmed with the PWM sequence, a tiny speaker, a battery and the switch. For certain people, it brought so much joy. Retrocomputing folks can be easily amused, it seems.

    I don’t have a PET, but I do have fond memories of the one we borrowed from school during the holidays around 1980. The PET doesn’t have great sound capabilities, as Dave at Tynemouth Software notes. But looking at the captured waveform dumped from VICE’s audio output, it looks suspiciously close to four repeats of these 7 steps:

    1. 80 cycles of 4329.0 Hz;
    2. 40 cycles of 2164.5 Hz;
    3. 20 cycles of 1082.3 Hz;
    4. 10 cycles of 541.1 Hz;
    5. 20 cycles of 1082.3 Hz;
    6. 40 cycles of 2164.5 Hz;
    7. 80 cycles of 4329.0 Hz.

    Conveniently, all of these steps have the same duration (0.01848 s). The odd series of frequencies seem to be coming from a clock divider: 4329.0 Hz is 1,000,000 ÷ 231, 2164.5 Hz is 1,000,000 ÷ (2 × 231), and so on.

    The end result, cobbled together by many calls to sox, sounds like this:

    Commodore PET Synthesized Startup Chime: mp3

    It sounds not too bad. It doesn’t have the fade-in effect caused by the PET’s power supply coming on, but it has the right character.

    Its spectrogram is particularly special:

    brightly coloured spectrogram of audio frequency against time. It's almost like a red carpet with many yellow and purple accents repeating on it, all the way up to 24 kHz
    Commodore PET Synthesized Startup Chime: spectrogram. Yes, it’s all square waves

    If you want the sound for a phone notification:

  • Ever heard the term “Appropriate Use of Technology”?

    Well, this is not that: For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow [mp3], as played on this:

    — an Arduino driving a stepper motor driving a Sankyo musical box. And yes, heat-shrink tubing ‘reinforced’ with dental floss doesn’t make a very robust flexible coupling.

  • ring ring ring ring zx spectrum phone

    A ringtone which has its own special way of telling you to answer the phone:

    (and manages to be really annoying while doing so.)

  • annoying ringtone

    Now I’ve discovered how easy it is to create MP3 ringtones for my BlackBerry (make a 64KBit mono MP3 of short length, e-mail it to the phone, open attachment, save it, and select “Use as ringtone”), I just had to use this little snippet of the DeZurik Sisters: dezurik.mp3.

  • sad-boy old-skool 8-bit ring tone

    My phone now rings the Uridium theme, thanks to smashTheTONES.

    I really should’ve gone for the quacking bit at the end of Pink Floyd’s Bike. Or something by Neutral Milk Hotel. Or Of Montreal. Man, my GPRS charges are gonna be huge this month.