Recently bought a cracklebox for a birthday present, and sometime later stumbled across this great mutant music machine blog ( musicthing ), which featured some cracklebox samples, an orgasmic blaster beam from Star Trek, this dork-tastic vintage – keyboard – radio – drummachine – tapedeck(!), and a lovingly crafted round-up of the stories behind the most famous ‘music jingles’ in the world : including the mac and microsoft start-up sounds, the THX deep-note sound, the intel-inside sound and the Channel 4 jingle ( which was the only one where the composer had the foresight to keep their copyright ). Nice work musicthing~!
“I like to say that the THX sound is the most widely-recognized piece of computer-generated music in the world,” says Andy Moorer. “This may or may not be true, but it sounds cool!”
“Turning the Mac on is one thing, but being forced to reboot from a crash is a totally different experience. I wanted to avoid a sound that would be associated with the crash. I wanted it to sound more like a “palette cleanser”.
– Jim Reekes, and first used on the Quadra 700, which launched in 1991 costing $7,000.