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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
