purpose

rickmer designed "sparkle", one of the standard ring tones found in Handspring's Treo Communicator series. sparkle can be found in all Treo devices, and thus in hundreds of thousands. Treos have been on sale since 2001.

design

challenge

the Treo's speaker is a simple piezo element that can only produce a very limited range of sounds. polyphony is not supported, and there is only one frequency generator driving the speaker. as a result of this, most ring tones on devices like this sound like alarms on 1980's digital wrist watches.

approach

the intent for creating sparkle was to break with the traditional monophonic design paradigm and create a sound within the given boundaries that would be monophonic, yet sound polyphonic. sparkle achieves apparent polyphony by generating an alternating sequence of 5 millisecond soundlets in various frequencies.

kudos

One of the leading handheld magazines, pen computing, writes:

"The rings, by the way, are mostly mundane beeps, but the "Flyby" ring and "Sparkle" notification sound are cool. The former sounds like a futuristic electronic beeping beetle zooming by, and the latter can only be described as the audio version of a bright point of light being reflected off a drop of water. Odd, I know, but so are the sounds. People definitely take notice."

listen to "sparkle" by clicking the play control below the image.