unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 15:58, Shane Fagan <shanepatrickfagan@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> It is very true and changing the entire sound theme has been kinda
> overlooked over the past 2 cycles and it really needs a revamp. It has
> been mentioned on this list at length but nothing seems to be happening.
> Id say Canonical need to either pay someone or do some sort of promoted
> competition for doing a complete professional modern sound theme.
>

Or are there not enough contributors to the spec itself?

I remember a guy did post some of his stuff to the list but I dont know
> what happened there.


guys:
[Ayatana] Fwd: CHI Day 4 continued
Mark Shuttleworth
Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:40:55 -0700

I'm looking forward to the first really functional sound theme in the linux
desktop.
Hopefully in Ubuntu first ;)

Here my favourite quote from the thread:

> "Authors discussed how artificial subtle expressions, simple and low-cost

expressions like beeping sounds or blinking LEDs, could convey the

internal states of artifacts to users like non verbal information."


In Hollywood back in the seventies, it was a genious named "Ben Burtt" who
designed the voice of that little robot "R2D2" for Star Wars. He also made
the sound for the Jedi Light Saber and other cool stuff.. there's a lot of
synthesis and physical modeling involved in the underlying concept, i'm
sure.
Burtt has studied some physics in college, which is not astonishing to me
after all of what he achieved with that kind of education.

Communicating a state is more of a functional or mathematical task than a
musical one. Art is secondary here, since we have a lot of functionality to
address properly, before we can enjoy the liberty of being artistic..

We can talk all day about music, notes and pitch, midi and digital sound
processing, at the end of that day consistency begs us to design one audible
language, such as the one R2D2 speaks.

 In user testing, they found that people could read emotions in sounds and

could decode sound according to their pitch, duration and intensity."


This refers to "beeping sounds", not to music.