A Short History of the Beep

I heart this post on the origins and impact of the humble mechanical beep:

“The beep is a purely human-made, electrical sound,” Jonathan Sterne, a professor of communication studies at McGill University, told me by e-mail. Plants don’t beep, nor weather, nor animals....If you hear a beep, you know that a person, or more likely his artifact, is signaling. There’s no wondering, Is that a beep or a nightingale? Is that a beep or a tornado? Beeps are also not voices or music.

If you hear a beep, you are near a piece of man's handiwork.

Virginia Heffernen, the author of the piece, says that the concept of 'beep' started in 1929, as car horns and machine rumbles were joined by the humble beep as a signifier which politely asks one to pay some attention.

Interestingly, one of the most important technological innovations of recent memory, the internet, is relatively beep-free:

On the other hand, as Sterne pointed out, the Web is “largely a silent medium.” We prefer to enjoy our visual and textual experience online in silence. Other than a few chimes and classy sound effects that communicate “everything is working” — the best being Brian Eno’s beautiful late-lamented Microsoft start-up sound — a personal computer should produce only the white noise of its fan. Sound design for computers could become like sound design for cars, Benjamin Tausig, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at New York University, wrote to me. “The ideal is not necessarily silence, but warmth, smooth operation and possibly even luxury.”

So does that beeping signal that something is not only clamoring for attention, but that it's declasse? An interesting thought for product designers.