The Devil's Interval

BBC News recently ran a wonderful article on the tritone, beginning, “A new film about the history of heavy metal highlights the so-called Devil’s Interval, a musical phenomenon suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.”

A tritone, as you probably know, is the interval from C to F#, which spans three whole tones. Subjectively, it has an unresolved quality, propelling a piece forward. Think of the first two notes in “Maria” from West Side Story or the Simpsons theme. (Dang! Now I’ll never be able to hear West Side Story without thinking of yellow cartoon characters.) Wikipedia lists more popular tritone songs on its tritone page.

So what does this have to do with digital media? I got an e-mail today urging me to create an “earcon,” or audible logo, to brand my business. And that made me think about one of the most enduring audible logos, the Macintosh startup sound. Engineer Jim Reekes recently noted that part of his motivation in designing the sound was that:

I was sick of the tritone “twaang” made by the Mac II. I’m not kidding—it was a mathematically perfectly tuned tritone chord, for gawd’s sake! It felt like a dentist’s drill—adding more injury to the insult [of having to reboot after a crash].

Which makes me wonder: Are there any famous tritone earcons out there?