This is rather disappointing. The dial-up modem sound is digitally created, and a digital lengthening of each tone is much higher quality.

Yeah, they're attempting to do a time shift with some sort of echo-y dithering going on. Since it's digital, no dithering is needed!

Indeed. The sound starts off with a dialtone slowed down 700x but pitch adjusted. Guess what, that's exactly equivalent to the real dialone. (Instead of recording it for 1 second, you record it for 700 seconds.)

This rest of the video continues in the same manner. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

The point is less what it is than how one feels when it's heard. Sounds and music are often perceived passively and subtly influence your feelings at the moment, particularly the sort of "creepy music" the linked sound resembles most closely.

If you are only analyzing the component noises there's a good chance you'll miss the emotions evoked, similar to the way a joke isn't funny if you dwell too much on the explanation.

Most of the time is the initial identification tones, followed by the line equalization phase where the modems are sorting out the exact response of the line. The sounds near the end that are sort of like white noise are the data transfer.

Part of the creepy is that the modems are using pitches that are not harmonically related. That is anti-musical (unless you are way out on the fringes) and denies you the ability to pigeon hole the sounds.

Even more amazing is Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch software that did the job! http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

Indeed that is a particularly nice sounding time stretch algorithm.

It sounds like a crystal forest on saturn.

Any sound slowed 700% is creepy. It's just the human brain associating high-pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice" sounds, while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring, otherwise associated with danger.

No, this is stretched 700% without affecting the pitch: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

I listened to it again, you're right. Sounds like a horror movie theme, maybe that's what gives the creeps. Although I have to agree with many others in this thread: it isn't that creepy, I heard much better ones.

". It's just the human brain associating high-pitch sounds with fun, children speaking,, bell ringing and other "nice" sounds"

Not really, children wailing, nails on a blackboard and other high sounds are very bothersome

Yes, some high sounds are friendly, but not all

> while low-pitch is of thunder, big animals (predators) roaring, otherwise associated with danger

Except most of the creepy parts here are high-pitch, not low-pitch sounds?

The article claims the pitch is unaltered (ie. they slowed down the sound and pitch corrected the result).

If I slow something 50%, I would expect its speed to be halved. If I slow something 100%, I would expect its speed to be zero. Not quite sure how you can slow something by more than 100%.

100% slowdown ("streched to 100% as long") would be half the speed. "Slowed down 700%" in this case means "stretched to 700% of its original duration".

Sounds similar to the 'keening' sounds that whales make. What would the whale sounds speeded up to 700% decode to for a dial-up modem? :-)

It just made me sleepy, not creeped out.

Next week on Hacker News: "Hey guys, I took a picture of my cat this morning"

This is creative and unusual. Sound design is an interesting and relevant topic.

Interesting, yes. Relevant to Hacker News... debatable.

But I agree with jrockway - pictures of cats should result in immediate banning (unless it's something like http://placekitten.com/).

> Relevant to Hacker News... debatable.

So debate. I have used sounds and music while hacking. I know video game developers whose job title is "sound designer". This link, while not particularly advanced or profound, still inspired me to think about creating sounds in a way I hadn't before.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Seems well within the guidelines to me.

Exactly, this one link provoked me to try a few things myself and I learned a few new things without even expecting it today.

I took this same app to other sounds (chainsaw, smoke detector) and it was all technically interesting. The modem tone was still the most interesting to me.

Take modem negotiation to a frequency display and zoom in, and you can actually see what the dual-tone in DTMF stands for. Heck, it looks like a piano roll if you want to take it in that direction for inspiration. Translate the row and column into a set of musical intervals and you'll be able to figure out how to play basic songs on your touch-tone phone.

Just tell me this isn't cool: http://imgur.com/sbtyY

I just found the first modem sound I could find off Google. By looking at the frequencies in the image, it is dialing 1-415-489-3565, which is still an active Earthlink dial-up number.

Small posts like this drag me in directions like this all the time. It leads me to questions I wouldn't have bothered with asking before today. This is absolutely within the guidelines and I thank the submitter for the enlightenment I received today.

Here, here. I've been considering options for adding ambiance to my game, and I think this paulstretch thing is very interesting.

Also, Justin Bieber slowed 700% sounds like Sigur Ros.

I should add: it wasn't an original comment, and it is a bit true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M

As one who ran a BBS and was constantly listening to these connections, I was expecting(hoping) to hear something I could understand.

At 2x speed up I think I recognize this as a 56k negotiation. I started using cable around that time so I can't tell the difference between x2 and K56.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the picture on that blog was derived from a Shepard Fairey poster, which was derived from a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster about noise titled 'Noise Control' in 1960:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kzaoY-eKntI/S-2gf01XkPI/AAAAAAAAAD...

Reminds me of FUture Sound of London - Dead Cities

Whales on a combination of LSD and steroids or extraterrestrials? Not sure...

Am I the only person who thinks the Lost intro music when they hear that? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MiwoDpbcdk

So this is what those 700%-faster-clocked-brain extraterrestrials get when they are tuning in on earth.

I didn't find it creepy at all. What were they expecting to find when they slowed it down?

Woke up a few minutes ago because I couldn't sleep (3:19). Hello Day!

Not creepy.

I agree but it does sound like music used by movies intended to evoke creepiness. It's because it sounds unnatural, far outside what we're used to hearing. Compare with, say, the Blaster Beam used by Jerry Goldsmith in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Beam

Creepy? I've seen, heard, and tasted worse thanks to the internet

For some reason it reminds me of Broken Saints.