The Sound of Apple: Marimbas, Radars & Reflections

You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

In our last episode, we explored how Apple uses sound design to give their devices a distinct voice.

Instead of futuristic, hyper-digital tones, Apple tends to choose sounds that are tactile and organic.

This makes these high-tech devices sound familiar, so people feel more comfortable using them.

You can hear this approach in sounds like the Note Alert for Messages, which is a C on a Glockenspiel.

There's also the chord alert for calendar, which is composed of three notes on a Kalimba.

We do have a through line of how we approach the design discipline.

That's Billy Sorrentino from the Apple design team.

Making sure that it is human-centered is first and foremost.

There's oftentimes an analog quality to it.

a purity to that sound, which is why we do that so often.

Find an instrument and record an analog instrument in a really beautiful way and lead with that tonality.

Apple has taken this approach for quite a while now.

For instance, when they made the default ringtone for the original iPhone, they could have chosen something dense and futuristic.

But instead, they chose an upbeat melody played on a single instrument, an instrument that's been around in some form or another for thousands of years.

Here's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007.

So this is what it looks like when you get a call.

This is what it sounds like.

It's one of our ringtones you can pick, of course.

That ringtone was called Marimba, and as iPhone sales skyrocketed, it became known all over the world.

Those default ringtones have really become so iconic, they have become part of the voice of the product.

That's Hugo Verai, who leads the Apple sound design team.

You hear it coming from your own phone,

from the people around you.

Hello.

But also, when you're watching a TV show or a movie.

Hi.

Hey.

You hear these sounds everywhere you go, really.

Marimba was the default iPhone ringtone up through iOS 6.

For iOS 7, Apple continued this Marimba theme with a new default ringtone called Opening.

Over the years, I've probably heard both Marimba and Opening thousands of times.

And at this point, they're kind of blended together in my mind as the classic iPhone sound.

It's funny how memory puts them together with the full package.

Like, the startup Mac sound.

That is anchored in, I think, most people's collective memories as part of the entire Mac experience.

Opening was the default for another four years until the launch of the iPhone X.

When the iPhone X was released, we wanted to create a signature ringtone just for this phone.

And reflection was that tone.

Reflection is a bit dreamier than marimba or opening, although once again, the instrument it's played on is a marimba.

We do a lot of nods to history, like marimba opening and reflection, the three iconic iPhone sounds.

Reflection, our current default ringtone, is made up out of two different layers.

One is the melodic part, like the Marima notes.

And then there's like an ambute layer with some effects.

With iOS 17 in 2023, Reflection got a small update.

What we decided to do is fade in the notes a little bit slower than the ambient layer.

So the beginning of the sound becomes a little bit more gentle, and it takes a little bit for it to develop into the recognizable melody that we all know so well.

This new version of Reflection was one of two dozen new ringtones in iOS 17.

Usually we design our sounds in-house, but for some special projects like a new suite of ringtones, we like working together with a diverse group of artists to give our users a variety of options to choose from.

In this case, that group of artists included the legendary beat maker Flying Lotus, also known as Fly Low.

Here's one of his most popular tracks called Crust.

We really thought that the atmospheric and cinematic nature of Fly Low's music would be a really good fit for a set of ringtones.

At first, I didn't know how to feel.

I was like, what?

They want me to be a ringtone maker now?

What is that all about?

That's Fly Low.

The one thing that was in my benefit was that I actually had made ringtones for myself before.

So I kind of feel like I knew what was pleasing to hear as a loop over and over and over and over and over again.

Something that alerts you but isn't abrasive.

Something that's musical but isn't cheesy.

So just finding that balance of where it's a bit of ambient, but also something that cuts through.

Flylo made two ringtones for Apple.

The first one is called Chalet.

The big difference, I guess, with making the ringtones in my own thing is just a matter of time.

Telling your musical story in such a short amount of time to where it feels complete and can loop infinitely.

It's like making the perfect loop.

Yeah, to me, it gives me this sense of peace and nostalgia.

Yeah, there is a nostalgic element.

I think there is some kind of longing in the sound.

I wouldn't say it's a sad thing, but there is some kind of memory.

Like you're listening to an old cassette.

It is nice to have these tones that I can associate with people who give me this warm feeling and this nostalgic feeling.

You know, if my girl calls me and I hear the chalet ringtone, it's like, oh,

you know, there's

something really nice about it.

That nostalgic lo-fi sound also comes through in Fly Low's other ringtone, Daybreak.

This lo-fi feel is very different from Apple's usual approach.

When we design sounds at Apple, we usually make them very clean sounding, very pristine and natural, and anything that sounds like crackles or whatever, we would remove that.

But that's exactly why we chose to work with Philo, because we wouldn't come up with this ourselves.

These new ringtones don't just use sound.

The Apple design team paired them very intentionally with the iPhone's vibrations, also known as the haptics.

When I play, especially daybreak, the haptics feel so good with it.

So, right now, I'm pressing my phone up against my microphone so you can really hear how my phone is vibrating.

It really feels like you're putting your hand on a subwoofer.

It's so well connected to the tones that it almost feels like the tones are creating this feeling, rather than just adding a vibration at the end.

This delicate blend of touch and sound permeates modern Apple products.

It's made possible through what Apple calls the Taptic Engine, which was introduced in 2015 with the Apple Watch.

For the first time, we had the Taptic Engine, which was the haptic actuator that could very precisely play taps on your wrist.

Soon after, the Taptic Engine was added to the iPhone.

This allowed them to design more precise and musical vibrations, like the little pulses you feel when you type.

To me, it's like haptics and sound are two sides of the same coin because it's all vibration.

But it seems like haptics can sometimes sync directly with the music,

but sometimes you're using it as an entirely different instrument.

Kind of like a bass guitar that's not playing the same as what a guitar would play.

Right.

Now, do you think of that haptic note as a bass frequency?

How do you put that together in your mind musically?

Yeah, I think for the shorter sounds, we try to synchronize them precisely because it just creates these satisfying experiences that are very short.

But if you have a longer tone, like an alarm or a ringtone, we can be more creative and we can actually see it as an instrument in the composition.

Here's another ringtone with a distinctive haptic pattern called breaking.

Along with ringtones and notifications, haptics also play a key role in the in-person Apple Pay experience.

For anyone who's not familiar with it, Apple Pay lets you pay for things by holding your iPhone or Apple Watch up to a contactless card reader.

With Apple Pay, the haptics play a big role because we know that you're not having your phone in your pocket, and we know that you have it in your hands when you're holding it up to the terminal.

So you will definitely feel the haptic.

To design the sound for Apple Pay, Hugo thought to himself, if my credit card had a voice, what would it say?

If you think of designing sounds for payment, you may start thinking about like a cash register or something traditional like that.

For Hugo, a classic ka-ching sound was close, but not quite right.

We wanted to create a sound that clearly communicated success.

There's this magical thing happening, like it's all connecting to your bank account, and then through the air, you pay.

But all you care about is that it was successful.

Here's the sound they landed on.

So there's a little bit of a coin-like chime in the sound.

Along with the sound, there's a short animation of a check mark, as well as two quick haptic vibrations.

And all three are perfectly synchronized into one satisfying little moment.

It just illustrates how what you feel, what you see, and what you hear blend together in a single experience.

While a coin sound felt like a logical choice for a payment system, other alerts were more abstract.

For instance, how do you turn emotions into quick audio shorthands?

That was the question that Hugo and his team thought about when they designed the sounds for the iPhone's tap backs.

These are the reactions you can give to a message, like thumbs up, thumbs down, heart, and question mark.

It was also quite a challenge because you're creating a language in sound.

You know, what does a heart sound like?

What does love sound like?

For thumbs down and thumbs up, they used quick two-note melodies.

You have the thumbs down, right, which is like to-do,

and then the thumbs up, which is kind of the opposite, to-do.

For the heart, we chose to actually use the thumbs up sound, but with a little chime at the end.

So it gives this little extra sparkle.

It's like, no, I don't like this message.

I love this message.

The next tap-back reaction was laugh.

For laugh, one of the first things we tried was just like record a person laughing and then just like kind of speed it up.

but they felt like that was too cartoonish but we did listen to like the voice and analyze the voice and see what melody that had

and then try to mimic that using some electronic sounds it really feels like a laugh

for the question mark tap back they used a single tone that slides up a bit in pitch it kind of sounds like someone saying huh

The exclamation mark tap back is more attention grabbing.

It sounds the most like a traditional alert sound, or maybe like someone saying, oh gosh.

Designing a unique sound for each reaction is actually pretty brilliant, because once people learn these sounds, they can identify a tap back response without even needing to pull their phone out of their pocket.

So when you send me a text and say, hey, do you want to get lunch?

I send you a thumbs up.

You don't even have to look at your screen.

It kind of showcases the power of sound in that way.

The amount of thought and design details and incredible amount of hours put into crafting individual sounds for every tap back is one of those design details that seems so nuanced and small, but matters so deeply to the team itself.

Most iPhone sounds are warm and inviting, but for years there was one default sound that was a big exception.

How and why that was replaced after the break.

Riverside is one of those tools that you might try for one reason and then realize that it can do so much more.

Because in today's digital world, remote recording has so many uses.

You might need to capture work meetings or training videos.

You might be recording interviews for a podcast, YouTube series, or documentary.

You might be live streaming to your dedicated followers or even saving family stories for future generations.

With Riverside, every person is recorded on their own device and the files upload to the cloud while you talk.

So if anyone's internet lags or drops out, you won't lose anything.

Once you're finished, Riverside's AI editor can fix eye contact, polish the edit, and even create highlight clips with captions that are ready to post on social media.

It's almost like having a full production studio right in your web browser.

Try Riverside for free at creators.riverside.com/slash 20k.

To unlock the full set of features, upgrade to Riverside Pro.

Before you check out, click the I Have a Coupon button and use promo code 20K for 20% off your subscription.

There's also a direct link in the show notes of this episode.

Congratulations to Nathan Gamson for getting last episode's mystery sound right.

I hunger.

Beware, coward.

That's the voice of Sinistar, the villain from the 1982 arcade game of the same name.

Sinestar was one of the very first games to use real recordings of a human voice.

Those sound bites were recorded by John DeRemus, who was a popular radio DJ in the Chicago area.

Here's John on his radio program.

And for the London Festival Orchestra, a beauty.

It's called

If I Rule the World.

And here's this episode's Mystery Sound.

If you recognize that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.20k.org.

Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win one of our super soft 20,000Hz t-shirts.

And if you want to snag some merch without guessing, just head to 20k.org slash shop.

Getting a new business off the ground can feel overwhelming.

You'll need a website, a payment system, a logo, and a way to advertise to new customers.

Thankfully, Shopify has you covered with all of these and more.

Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

That includes giants like Mattel and Gymshark, but also thousands of people who ask themselves, what if I just try this?

With Shopify, you'll get website templates and built-in AI tools to craft a beautiful web store that fits your brand.

With their marketing and email tools, you can spread the word wherever people are scrolling so you can find and keep new customers.

And if you're ever feeling stuck, Shopify's support is always available to share their advice.

Turn those dreams into

and give them the best shot of success with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash 20K.

That's shopify.com slash 20K.

Shopify.com slash 20K.

Starting a business can feel like juggling while riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

You have to think about your branding, your inventory, your marketing, your customers, and somehow still have time to sleep.

That's where Shopify comes in.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world.

If you see that purple Shop Pay button on any website, that's how you know it's Shopify.

Shopify has hundreds of beautiful templates, so you can launch a web store that matches your style with no coding required.

Their built-in AI tools help you write product descriptions, enhance photos, and even craft entire marketing campaigns.

And behind it all, Shopify is your business partner for everything from managing inventory to processing returns.

Turn those dreams into

and give them the best shot at success with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/slash 20K.

That's shopify.com/slash 20K.

Shopify.com/slash 20K.

The Apple design team puts a ton of thought into the sound of their products, and these sounds are crafted with carefully chosen sonic ingredients.

I think we're always looking for sounds that are concise and compact and really tell the essence of the experience.

Elaborate sounds can get annoying pretty quickly, especially when you hear them over and over.

And sometimes, the best option is no sound at all.

We really are a thousand no's for every yes.

The amount of things that we could try, or places where we could put sounds in our OSs and our products, it's pretty limitless.

And Hugo and the sound team are the first to say, no, actually we think that's wildly inappropriate to have sound there.

And really being critical about where sound plays an impactful role, that's as much the design process as crafting the sounds themselves.

One of the only times where it makes sense for your phone to make a loud, alarming sound is when you've lost it.

If you have an iPhone, then you might be familiar with FindMy.

It's an app that helps you find your lost Apple device by making it play a sound.

This one to me sounds like it's very intentional.

It's kind of even going back to this, we need to be very overt and very pointed with this sound, not blend into the environment.

We need to be very attacky, very sharp, very bright.

That's right.

The character of the sound, why this is such a good Find My sound, is it is kind of persistent.

It has multiple notes that repeat.

And then it's pretty dry.

There's not a lot of effects and echoes,

which of course would make it really hard to find.

That sharp, dry sound helps if you're trying to find your iPhone under a cushion or deep inside a bag.

FindMy also works with Apple's AirPods, which have their own unique set of UI sounds.

AirPods were our first wireless headphones.

And so we had the opportunity to design some new sounds for that, like connect sound and a disconnect sound.

And for those sounds we wanted to create something that was still kind of simple, but we didn't want it to be just a generic poop boop, you know, connect tone.

And we wanted to be a little bit more special.

For these sounds, they decided to stray away from the marimbas and glockenspiels of the iPhone.

We were using modular synthesizers to come up with new sounds, things that weren't very common in our palette.

And we ended up with sounds that still have the simple quality of the two-tone doo-doo or connected, but that have a little bit more depth to them.

Here are the AirPods connected and disconnected sounds, back to back.

But then some years later, we introduced active noise cancellation with AirPods Pro.

The AirPods Pro have three different noise cancellation modes.

Each one needed a distinct sound to tell the user which mode they're currently in.

So we had to make sure that these sounds worked well together with the sounds that we already had.

The first mode is active noise cancellation, which blocks out unwanted sound.

So for active noise cancellation, we have a sound that sounds like you're closing something off.

Next is transparency mode, which amplifies the sounds around you.

It's basically the opposite of noise cancellation, for when you need to be aware of your surroundings.

For transparency, it opens up.

There's like this airy feel to the the sound.

To really hear the difference, here's active noise cancellation and transparency mode back to back.

The third one is called adaptive mode.

Which is a feature that adjusts according to the noise levels around you.

It feels almost like magic, like the technology is working for you and it's listening for you.

And the sound for this mode has a little bit of sparkle to it.

Finally, there's a sound for when the battery is low.

The low battery sound is one that we don't want to be ambiguous about.

We want it to be super clear because we don't want you to run out of batteries.

I remember the first time I heard it, I was like, I know exactly what that means.

I don't need to even look it up.

I don't need anything.

Yeah, there's different elements to this sound that make it that way.

I think, of course, we have that winding down feel of the,

which makes it kind of satisfying, which is funny for a low battery sound.

Altogether, these AirPod sounds form a cohesive sonic palette or voice.

It's a voice that's friendly and even a bit playful.

That came out of a lot of the design discussions of what are AirPods?

What are the feel we want people to have?

How do we communicate these things through Soundbit in a way that still feels friendly and a little bit of a wink and a little bit of a, hey, we're here with you on this journey, rather than kind of cold technical language of 10% left or whatever percentage.

Another group of sounds that's gone through a big evolution over the years is the iPhone's alarm tones.

Here's radar, which was the default alarm tone for 11 years.

Some people have a hard time waking up in the morning.

If they used radar, they would wake up.

Now, some people like myself prefer a much more gentle waking experience.

When we introduced the bedtime feature on iOS, we introduced a set of sounds that were specifically designed to help you wake up in a pleasant way.

And Early Riser is the default there.

It's a beautiful piano sound that starts very slowly and then fades in.

And then there's a chime.

That is the element that makes sure that you will actually wake up rather than just stay in this dream state.

Well, I will say, on behalf of millions of others, thank you for whatever that change was.

With iOS 17, Hugo and his team created a new default alarm tone.

This one is a little closer to that original radar sound.

It's called radial.

So radial is a sound that still has that continuous beep that radar also has, but it has some flourishes, like some effects.

The sound itself is a little bit more gentle.

Gentleness is a theme throughout the timer and alarm sounds for iOS 17.

Great examples of those are Seedling and Unfold, the tones that we worked with Max Richter on.

Max Richter is one of my absolute favorite modern composers.

He's composed a ton of beautiful music, like the theme from the Leftover series.

Like Flying Lotus, Max Richter composed two sounds for Apple.

The first one is called Unfold.

These sounds can be used for people to wake up to, or they can be used as ringtones.

And so we want to really provide something for people to get notified in a bit more gentle way than was previously possible.

And here's the second piece that Max Richter made for Apple called Seedling.

Over the years, our speakers have become better.

So we are now capable of playing sounds that would have been hard to play on the phone speaker in the past.

Sounds that have some lower frequencies and that have a little rounder character.

We can now play those sounds in a clean way.

And a great example is the piano tones that Max Richter designs.

While Hugo and Billy are crucial to the voice of Apple's products, it takes a village to make these devices look, sound, and feel the way they do.

From the gentle melody that wakes you up in the morning, to the pulse of the haptics when you make a purchase, to the way the icons zoom in from the edges when you unlock your screen.

Each of these components has an entire team of experts behind it, and they all work together to create one seamless user experience.

I might be designing the sound for Apple Pay, while at the same time, somewhere else in the studio, somebody is designing the check mark, the animation that ends up being perfectly synchronized to the sound that I'm designing.

And so I can walk over to that person and we can discuss it.

At Apple, no design detail is too small to care about.

Every single sound is given the same level of focus and attention, whether it's the hero ringtone or it's the heart and the tap back.

We often spend so much time thinking about sounds that people might not even hear, but we think it really enriches the experience if you do hear them.

So it's really worth the exploration and the time it takes to develop these kinds of experiences.

When we believe in something, we go very, very, very deep.

And we think that's kind of what makes an Apple product feel Apple.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound.

Hear more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Nicholas Harder and Casey Emmerling with help from Grace East.

It was sound design and mixed by Jesus Serteg and Brandon Pratt.

Thanks to our guests, Billy Sorrentino, Hugo Varay, and Flying Lotus.

And a special thanks to everyone at Apple who helped make these episodes possible.

The soundtrack of this episode is by Keith Kenneth and the Unseen Music Library.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.