Booms, Boings and Wisecracks

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BEEP -- simple, utilitarian and sufficient to alert a computer user that his machine had been turned on or that a floppy disk had failed. Then came the Macintosh, with its built-in sound chips and an onscreen control panel that enabled Mac enthusiasts to replace the beep with a boing, a clink-clank or a monkey's chirp. Finally, last spring Microsoft put sound- control software in the latest version of its Windows program, extending the power to customize a computer's noises to the 90 million owners of IBM PCs and compatible machines.

Suddenly, computers that had whirred quietly for years started making the strangest sounds. Some began to moo like a cow every hour on the hour. Others greeted each new program with the sound of breaking glass. Still others spent their spare moments doing celebrity impersonations: Ed McMahon belly laughing, Ronald Reagan mumbling, "Well . . .," George Bush advising that a particular keystroke "wouldn't be prudent" or Star Trek's Dr. McCoy spluttering, "Dammit, Jim!"

It's all part of the newest spin in computing: taking off-the-shelf personal computers and giving them a personal stamp. Workers tired of staring at the same old screens can now choose from a growing shelf of software that lets them customize just about any feature of their machines, from the color and texture of the screen display to the design of the windows, buttons, cursors and arrows that appear on it. The trend passed a milestone this fall when Berkeley Systems' After Dark, a screen-saver program that paints idle computer screens with swimming fish, flying toasters and other fanciful images, became the best-selling software product in the U.S.

But no corner of the customization market is booming quite like the one for booms, zooms and wisecracks. There are already more than a dozen programs offering a wide variety of sounds for Macintosh computers and Windows-equipped PCs, and more are on the way. Most follow the same basic format: they display a menu of dozens of prerecorded sounds and, next to that, a corresponding menu of "system events" the sounds can be linked to, from start-up to shutdown and everything in between.

The granddaddy of custom audio software is SoundMaster, a piece of "shareware" for the Macintosh that can be downloaded free from CompuServe and other computer networks (a $15 contribution for the programmer is encouraged). SoundMaster can instruct a computer to cough whenever the machine requests a floppy disk, burp when it ejects a disk or bark when it launches a program. Soon after it was released, a lively trade sprang up at user-group meetings for bootleg sounds tape-recorded from the TV and digitized in home computers, from Bart Simpson saying, "Thanks, man" to Porky Pig stuttering, "That's all, folks."

Today you can walk into a computer store and buy professionally recorded digital sounds by the hundreds. Prosonus of North Hollywood sells a $30 disk called Mr. Sound FX stuffed with 150 noises, from "Psycho Strings" (ominous, insistent chords from the Hitchcock film) to "Dead Man Scream," including 75 bits produced by actor Michael Winslow, the one-man sound machine featured in Police Academy movies who can make bombs drop, jets roar and lasers blast using nothing more than a microphone. Sound Source Unlimited of Westlake Village, California, specializes in collections of clips lifted from classic sci-fi movies -- ideal for hearing HAL the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey intone, "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me . . ." every time you turn off your machine.

In October, giant Microsoft joined the fray, offering three $40 disks in its new SoundBits series. One features sound clips from old Hanna-Barbera cartoons, like Fred Flintstone's trademark "Yabba-dabba-doo!" and Yogi's "Smarter than the average bear." Another boasts 50 famous lines from Hollywood classics, including Bogart's "the stuff that dreams are made of" from The Maltese Falcon and the Wicked Witch of the West threatening Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!" Baseline Publishing, in Memphis, Tennessee, goes one step further with a $40 program it calls Talking Moose and His Cartoon Carnival. This sneaky bit of software waits until you least expect it and then lets loose a random quip such as "Boy, are you lazy" or "I like lawyers . . . stir-fried!"

Being caught off guard by a wiseacre computer may not be everybody's idea of fun. One New York City office worker had to do some fast explaining when his wife overheard a strange woman saying in her sexiest voice, "Tell me what you want me to do." As a rule, it's a good idea to break in these programs gradually, starting with a few simple sounds and working your way up. Most people get such a kick when they first hear their computer talk that they tend to go overboard -- assigning messages to every keystroke and driving themselves crazy the minute they need to do some real work. But these folks can always rip out the sound effects and go back to where they started -- with a simple, utilitarian beep.