RIM commissions the prolific composer and former drummer for The Police to create a ‘soundtrack’ for the BlackBerry Bold.
You won’t find the latest work by highly-regarded composer Stewart Copeland in any CD store or on iTunes. Instead, it’s baked into the silicon of the
BlackBerry Bold.
RIM commissioned Copeland to come up with a unique ‘theme’ for its just-launched smartphone. The result was a signature five-note melody which Copeland expanded into a percussive minute-long track simply named ‘Bold’ that’s preloaded (along with mock-up album art!) into the Bold’s ‘Sample Songs’ folder.
A softer version with an fade-in is used as an ‘alarm tone’ to gently rouse the Bold owner from his or her slumber, while six variations – which are actually excerpts form various parts of the Bold theme – are available as ring tones.
Writing ringtones may be new to Copeland, but unleashing his inner geek isn’t. Copeland has long been a dab hand at the digital world, and is an Apple fan who does all his composing on Macs.
We don’t know how much RIM paid Copeland for his efforts, but you can bet it was a lot more than the US$35,000 which Microsoft handed over to Brian Eno to conjure up the six-second start-up sound for Windows 95. That short arpeggio went on to become ‘the Microsoft sound’.
We certainly hope it was more than Microsoft paid King Crimson guitarist and composer Robert Fripp for cooking up the various sounds of Vista (although if Fripp gets royalties, just the chime of Vista’s ‘error’ message alone would have raked in millions to date... maybe Microsoft should have someone compose a Blue Screen of Death ditty).
Anyway, without further ado, apcmag.com now proudly presents the world premiere of Stewart Copeland’s newest work: the Bold theme, Bold Alarm theme, and all six Bold ringtones.
(Forgive the somewhat pedestrian quality of the recordings, which don’t do justice to Copeland’s work, but as the audio files in the Bold are copy-protected the only way we could share this amazing tunes with you was to recording them while they played over the Bold’s very punchy speaker).
The Bold theme
Bold alarm
Bold ringtones