Conor O'Sullivan
28 | The beep goes on, but not for long.
Every Wednesday, the Sun-Times Business Section features a mystery occupation. See if you can guess the job before the end of the interview.
What are the tools of your trade?
They all relate to electronic sound and sound in general: Computers, different types of software. But the most important tools are my ears, because I work with sound, and I try to hear what people hear, and am always conscious of hearing things in different environments.
You are a composer?
For sure. It's a different kind of composition. It is composing in very short spaces.
What are the lengths of your compositions?
They can last milliseconds to 15 or 20 seconds.
How long are your longest compositions?
About 15 seconds. But a lot of the carrier networks, the T-Mobiles and Cingulars, their voicemail will cut in in about 20 seconds. That number varies, plus or minus five seconds. That's the time period we have to work with.
So your best work will always be interrupted by someone answering the phone?
Hopefully, it will be interrupted because people have heard it. And that's the primary purpose.
Are some of your compositions more popular than the songs on the pop charts?
They do have a huge audience. The first thing you hear out the box is the sound on the phones.
Your music is heard all over the world. Are there cultural differences?
Last year I got to work on Motofone, which is for emerging markets, and our primary customers are non-Western users. I grew up in a Western country (Ireland) and grew up listening to Western music. In different cultures, different sounds don't necessarily mean the same thing. We designed a different set of interface sounds for Motofone. It was an amazing project because I got to hear how people in different countries heard sound and hear music.
Are you a composer of music?
I compose ringtones. There are between 20 and 40 ringtones on a cell phone. These are ring sounds and text message sounds. I also write UI (user interface) sounds, which give you information about where you are and what you are doing when you are navigating through the menu in a phone. UI sounds give the users feedback that they are not otherwise getting. Sound allows you to offset visual information.
For example, if you are scrolling down and hit the end of a list, you get a sound that tells you that's what you're doing. They can last milliseconds. Most people call them the beeps.
For the more musical ringtones, I design how they're going to sound, and then we outsource the actual composition. We direct how they're going with it, and how we want it to sound.
Conor O'Sullivan is sound design manager for Consumer eXperience Design at Motorola in Chicago. He wrote the "Hello Moto" ringtone, his best-selling work.