ok, now you're just showing off!

it's "HipCat", probably the most popular internal ringtone on the sidekick2. It's an RMF file containing a chicka-wah-wah guitar sample, plus MIDI instruments from the internal GM bank. it was specifically designed to demonstrate the Beatnik technology, since that wah-wah sound is exactly the kind of thing General MIDI isn't very good at. the ringtone itself was most infamously characterized as "pure porn" by wunderkind engineer ficus kirkpatrick; it was also loud, noisy, and could you BE more annoying!?

well, i admit, when i heard it in the imax theatre on the huge speakers, i was so stunned i exclaimed "i wrote that!" perhaps a little too loudly. a few heads turned, wondered what the hell was wrong with me, and went back to the movie. but the funny thing is -- none of the devices on Don's belt is a sidekick!

and now it becomes clear to me what happened: this is not t-mobile product placement, this is the post production audio guys sitting around going, "ok, when his phone rings, it should play the *most* annoying ringtone possible, to show the audience what a dick this guy is ... who's got an annoying ringtone?" and somebody pulled out their trusty sidekick and played HipCat into a really nice microphone ...

holy crap, batman! i really AM the "annoying ringtone" guy!!!

2. Janet Jackson

it's no secret our device is popular with the celebrity crowd. for awhile there, it was the "must have" hollywood device: demi moore got instant messages from ashton kutcher on the letterman show, jennifer aniston's sidekick howled during a diane sawyer interview (one of mine again, thanks) and paris hilton's device was most famously hacked ...

last year, i discovered that janet jackson has a sidekick, and apparently, she uses it in the studio while the mic is live. On her album "20 Y.O.", at the end of the track "With U", there's a
short recording of miss jackson using her sidekick , and you can hear my audio UI loud and clear. hey look, i'm on a janet jackson album, sorta!

but there's something rather odd about that recording, though i may be one of the few people on the planet who would recognize it. in my O'Reilly article about Audio UI as Interactive Music, i talk about designing system sounds to be the "notes" of an interactive "song", and each song has a theme, and each theme has a name.

when miss jackson opens her device and types on it, you can hear the back button and menu open on a sidekick3. but then she says "oops!", scrolls up twice, down once, presses the wheel button, and flips open (ready?) => a sidekick2! before the oops, you hear the "crystalline" audio UI, but afterwards, it's "abstract technical" (if you listen carefully, you can even hear the difference in sound quality: the sidekick2 audio is dulled by the 11kHz IMA4:1 WAV format [aka lo-rez crap], whereas the sidekick3 UI is much cleaner, clearer, with higher frequency content (22k 48kbps MP3, the sidekick's "standard ringtone" resolution).

i assume the hiptop interlude is included to make you feel like you're sitting in the studio with miss jackson while she checks her email. but the truth is, no sidekick ever made that sound, and the clip has been spliced together from two instances of "device use in studio while mic is active".

this tells me two things:
   a) janet jackson liked her sidekick2 so much, she upgraded to a sidekick3, and
   b) janet jackson uses her device with the system sounds turned on!

i hope you don't mind if i consider that a personal triumph ...

3. Hip Hop Sightings

again, no news flash our device is popular amongst the hiphop brethren. Jay-Z featured one of the very first models in his videos, and soon every rapper was following suit. there's even a T.I. video that displays, in sequence, all the things that make him a baller badass - his gold bling, his hot babes, his piles of cash, his sidekick2, his rolls royce, his - wait a minute, what was that!? jewelry, women, money ... cell phone? i guess we have arrived ...

of course, i take no credit for that, i'm an innocent bystander in that market, but i do take a little secret pride whenever i hear one of my sounds show up in the hiphop genre.

first, there's Zeps, an up and coming puerto rican rapper outa brooklyn who kinda shocked some corporate types around here with his, uh, shall we say, "spicy" lyrics (ok, so, more like completely fucking filthy lyrics, but hey, that's why we like him). he made this beat using the "abstract technical" UI sounds. i applaud his skills, attitude, and choice of source material ...

then there's Ali & Gipp - Go 'Head: Closed Captioned ... in the middle of the first verse (00:42), for no apparent reason, you can clearly hear "sad clown", the Danger official low battery alert. i can't quite tell if this was intentional or not, could be somebody just forgot to mute their device while laying down a vocal track -- and they just left it in ...

but by far, my favorite hip hop reference to date is "My Sidekick" by Nappy Roots. the track starts off with the V/O alerts ("attention" and "new message"), you can even hear the vibration motor buzzing in sync with the alerts, then there's an "abstract technical" flip open, before the beat starts. btw, "new message" is the out-of-box default alert for "SMS text received". if someone is texting you over and over, you'll hear that sound again and again.

The alert itself is a low resolution voice-over recording, and was specifically designed to emulate the Majel Barrett computer interface on Star Trek. The voice talent is my longtime friend Diane Wasnak, aka Pino the Clown, who I know from my days in the Pickle Family Circus (that's right, i really did run away and join the circus).

and here's the funny thing: I know what's going on here, it's not exactly a secret -- people are using their sidekicks to hook up. in fact, it's apparently THE hook up device for our target market ... and so it follows that a certain percentage of text messages and voicemails on the sidekick are going to be booty call notifications.

and so, as the song suggests, a fairly high percentage of booty call notifications are going to be associated with my friend saying "new message". now, think about that for a second: what if who-knows-how-many-thousands of people heard the sound of your voice, and thought "yeah, i am getting laid tonight!"

how would that make you feel?

   - pdx