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Behind the Story of the iPhone's Default Text Tone

Posted by timothy on from the it's-the-little-things dept.

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.

5 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. I must be some kind of outlier by Anonymous Coward · · 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 is possibly more well known than Mickey Mouse.

  2. Here's the sound by the_other_chewey · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not being an iThing user myself, I didn't know what this Tri-tone
    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.

    Aaaaah, that one.

  3. Re:Hardly Iconic by Njovich · · Score: 2, Informative

    Oh he came up with it? Was that before or after Francisco Tarrega wrote in in 1902?

  4. Not really a "tritone" by Clueless+Moron · · Score: 3, Informative

    In music lingo, "tritone" just means an interval of six semitones, or an augmented fourth. It's the strange sound you get when playing a C and F# at the same time.

    1. Re:Not really a "tritone" by harperska · · Score: 3, 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'.