Snippet: Marimba ☇

Brian Roemmele shares the story of how the default iPhone ringtone came to be:

Ideally, a ring tone should register very clearly and distinctively in the audio range that is central to human hearing, from about 2 to 4 KHz, with a Dynamic range (quietest to loudest) of about 96 dB. Even though this audio range is quite crowded with a lot of sound, it is also precisely where most spoken languages carry a majority of phoneme distinction, and thus, we have evolved a relatively high level of sound discrimination central to this audio range.

For a ringtone to be decoded ideally by the brain, the timbre of the audio envelope ideally should pulse to a full dynamic range to nearly no sound with-in a 3 – 5 second cycle (Bell Labs Research). The relative amplitudes of the various harmonics primarily determine the timbre of instruments and sounds, though onset transients, formants, noises, and inharmonicities also play a role.