Re: any sounds needed?

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Maurice Stam wrote:

> So I can assume, my sounds fall under the category of Clippy, as i 
> haven't received any response as well.

Yea, sorry. I did listen and I did mean to reply.

The sounds you're referring seem to be musical phrases on a synth.

> I am wondering, what kind of sounds .do. apply to the way the GNOME 
> users would like to have.

The desktop allows us to theme the desktop with leopard-skin. We can also
do themes for Star Trek, Hello Kitty, or anything else under the sun.

So why is the default desktop visual theme so "drab" on virtually all the
desktops out there? Because the goal of the default theme is to appeal to
the masses, by having something that will irritate the least number of
people while helping them get their work done. The goal is not to be 
beautiful, artistic, stunning, or flashy.

The default visual theme is shades of gray with a few color highlights,
because that doesn't distract people from their work, and it gives those
people useful information on the on-screen elements (e.g. drop shadows to
allow them to quickly recognize widgets).

We're talking about the _default_ desktop audio theme here. The same goals
applies to this theme - make it unobtrusive and fairly bland, but with
sounds that will provide useful feedback to users when they are using the
desktop. If you look at Hollywood, that's the place that practically
invented sound effects to accompany a visual display, and the whole point
of those effects is to enhance the realism with sounds that support the 
on-screen action but don't distract from it.

I went and listened to the existing sounds in the current gnome-audio -
they're not as bad as I remembered them to be. Improvements could be made,
to be sure, but those changes are likely to involve taking samples of
unusual sounds, and playing with waveform generators and tweaking
millisecond slices of a 1 second long sound, rather than taking the output
of speech or music synthesizers...

Going back to the Hollywood allusion, the idea is to design non-obtrusive
desktop event sound effects that seem "natural" and don't get in the way
of the main action on-screen. :) http://www.filmsound.org/starwars/ has
examples of how some of the sound effects for Star Wars were done.  
filmsound.org is a great site in general for ideas on desktop sound
effects. :)

And of course, at the same time, for people like us who really care about
"cool sounds", there is the freedom to not use the default. The important
thing to recognize is that the goal of the _default_ theme is not to
appeal to people like us who have innovative taste in music and sounds,
but to the 95% people out there who don't.

> I personally feel that a voice telling you ' welcome to gnome' gets
> irritated as well, at long terms.

Totally...

Hope this long explanation of my mindset helps you understand what I'm 
suggesting to be done,
-- Elliot