Beatnik

» see beatnik.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the polyphonic ringtone arrived in turkey the way every nokia thing arrived in turkey, all at once and everywhere. by 2003 a classroom full of phones going off in sequence was a texture of ordinary life, tinny little four-note arrangements coming out of a speaker the size of a fingernail. i never knew there was a company behind that sound, and if somebody had told me it was thomas dolby's company i would have assumed they were making it up.

he founded it in 1993 as headspace, in california, with mary coller. the complaint was simple: there was no good way to put interactive audio into software. midi was tiny but sounded like whatever soundcard the listener happened to own, and recorded audio sounded right but was far too large for a modem. headspace's answer was the rich music format, which shipped the instrument samples along with the score, so the composer controlled what you actually heard and the file stayed small.

the beatnik plug-in and its editor came out in april 1997. sun licensed the audio engine for java that same year, which put it inside a lot of virtual machines quietly. yahoo used it for the sonic logo. so did 7 up. in april 1999 david bowie's site carried an rmf version of "fame" where you chose which layers of the track to hear, which was a genuinely strange thing to find on a web page in 1999 and is the single best surviving demonstration of what the format was for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it became ~

headspace became beatnik, inc. in april 1999 and filed for an ipo in 2000 after losing 10.5 million dollars the year before. then the bubble went, and with it every marketing budget that had been paying for a website that made noise at you. by 2001 web audio was not a business.

what saved the company was that nokia had a problem shaped exactly like beatnik's technology. handset makers wanted polyphonic ringtones without paying for a dedicated sound chip, which was the route the japanese manufacturers had taken. beatnik cut the audio engine down into minibae, small enough to run in software on a phone. the nokia 3510 in 2002 was the first handset to ship with it. sony ericsson and samsung licensed it too, and by february 2005 the company was counting more than 250 million phones.

~ the long tail ~

dolby stepped down as chief executive in 2002. he had wanted nokia to use rmf so the ringtones would sound like music, nokia stuck to standard formats, and what came out the other end was the thin polyphonic sound everyone remembers. in his memoir he admits he was quietly mortified and worried he would be blamed for the global ringtone plague. the polyphonic version of the nokia tune was arranged by ian livingstone, not by dolby, which has not stopped the internet from crediting him for it for twenty years.

truetones killed the category. once a phone had enough memory to hold a real audio file, nobody needed an engine that synthesized music on the handset, and the ringtone business collapsed into people just using a song. beatnik stopped trading in december 2009 and was dissolved at the end of 2011. steve hales, who had built the original engine at igor's software laboratories before headspace bought it, open-sourced minibae that same year with the company's blessing. it is still on github, which makes it one of the few graves here you can still compile.

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