I do agree somewhat on the battery warnings and alerts, however even these are louder and stand out from the rest. The dynamics of the sounds also work much better for computers and laptops with smaller speakers…

Playing around with the longhorn set of sounds, my speakers on my monitor would physically vibrate regardless of volume. I also was not a huge fan of the female vocal spurts - so it is nice to see that is gone.

That being said, I have actually exported the longhorn sounds for use on my cell phone for incoming text messages and there the timbre works wonderfully. I don’t think I could do that with the proper Vista set.

“That said, these posts underly the bottom line: what people want is choice. Fortunately, Vista, like XP, supports themes. Now it’s just a matter of releasing some of the sounds that hit the cutting-room â€â€? erm, committee â€â€? floor. That, I’ll admit, is a very good idea.”

How can we not be thinking and planning this given the hours of excellent material we have in the can?

All of this speculation and fuss is about the default sound scheme (and Startup sound), which were intentionally designed to be subtle.

For the record, there were no ‘committee decisions’ that led to the default sound scheme or Startup sound design — we did not vote on these choices. There were intelligently applied priorities and well-defined UX design principles that led to the selection of the default sound designs.

And, of course, also by definition, not everyone will like the defaults. Is this a surprise for anyone here? But I believe we can objectively say that we delivered on our goals.

The default set is what it is because this is a general purpose OS that will be used in millions and millions of different environments.

IMHO, Windows Vista represents the beginning of the next WAVE in OS evolution where thousands of minor, almost undetectable imnprovements (like this one), when taken together, will enhance the quality of our day to day work and play.

But I don’t believe it is that useful to debate the theory behind any of this without actually experiencing these sounds in context — it will be easy to ‘test’ all of this yourself very soon by actually using the product.

And coming back to the quote at the beginning of this comment, stay tuned for some surprises that will take us above and beyond the defaults.

* * *

One cannot judge such things on a moment’s hearing.

Amen, Kokorozashi. And great to see this dialog going on here. I love this site, BTW.

I’d love to hear feedback from this audience after you’ve actually experienced these sounds in the product.

Listening and judging them out of context is a waste of time and energy as they are not designed to be heard or used as standalone sounds separately from the experiences they were designed to complement.

-Steve

* * *

As for whether the sounds are any good, I think the jury is still well and truly out. One cannot judge such things on a moment’s hearing. Live with them for a while, then bitch if you must, but base it on experience.

Of course, this comes back to my original point, which is that what a lot of artists want is for the OS to be boring, and then exciting stuff comes out of the actual work they do. But I give Microsoft some credit for being an occasional arts patron.

I mean, the new sound set is quite good, and far less grating than what ships with XP. But why hire Fripp to do something like this? My guess is he made 10 times what the programming-monkeys at Microsoft made to actually incorporate these sounds into Vista. And all to make something that, frankly, sounds like it was made by a bunch of programming monkeys in cubicles.

Is Bill Gates simply trying to gain some currency with computer geeks who may happen to also be prog-rock geeks? (Of which I am the latter, of course.) Or is Bill maybe just a King Crimson freak?

The XP ‘ding’ and ‘chords’ sounds are particularly horrible. So the new Vista sounds are sweeter.

They won’t blow you off your seat when something happens, which I don’t like, even in OSX. In XP I have system sounds off. In OSX I keep a few like mail sent and trash.

Clever of Microsoft to engage Fripp. Like most people, these sounds are not what I was expecting. For anyone that hasn’t tried, designing UI sounds is difficult. I think these will work well and respect to Micrsoft for acknowledging it as an important part of the UI.

Hell, if this was my sound set going to billions of people’s computers I’d be wrapped.

On the bulletin board outside his office was a list of questions he asked the team to ponder as it developed sounds. The competing directives (memorable yet not irritating, etc.) were almost like a koan. I’ve been meaning to write up what I saw and heard on that visit….