"Apocalypse Now's" Robert Duvall sings the praises of napalm with the click of a mouse. Homer Simpson shouts "D'oh!" when you empty your trash. Don McLean sings farewell to Miss American Pie when email arrives.
Computer sound files from movies, television, music and other sources add a whole different dimension to computing, and Dartmouth's computer oriented environment leads many students to seek out sound clips from friends and on various web sites.
The majority of Dartmouth students have these files -- some have many, like Jen Bess '00, who has "about 150 of them." Bess explains that she sometimes uses them as accompaniments to email messages, because they are "appropriate to send to someone in the context of a blitz conversation."
The sound files come from many sources. "Some of them I made myself from CD's," Bess said in an email message, "and others I've gotten from friends." She also gets files from various web sites on the internet.
There are many such sites out there. One of the best known sites for sounds from films is www.moviesounds.com, which features high-quality sound files that you can download relatively quickly. Another good resource for movie sounds is http://sunsite.unc.edu: 80/pub/multimedia/sun-sounds/movies.
The EARchives, a popular sound download web site, also features sound clips from television and movies. However, EARchives also features a few funny compilations of various clips from different media, which are mixed together effectively.
The EARchives can be found at http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1158/earchive.html.
A particularly popular genre of quotes come from the television show "The Simpsons." There are actually several web sites dedicated entirely to Fox Television's cartoon satire.
One is called Homer's Proverb, and has quotes from even the most obscure Simpsons characters. Homer's Proverb can be found at www.webbsight.com/homer.
Other students use sound files they have received from friends or gotten from the internet as alert sounds for their computers. Kendra Kosko '99 uses a Howard Stern quote, so that she can hear him say "bababooey" when she receives email.
The wide range and variety of information flowing freely out on the web makes it simple for anyone to obtain even the most remote sound file. This, coupled with the powerful force of Dartmouth's computer fixation, has led to the proliferation of these downloads on campus.
Some students just like to have the sounds to listen to. In an email message, Zachary Holt '98 said, "I use them to entertain myself and friends in moments of sheer depression," adding that these quotes "vary in content."
"Some are from movies. Others are songs. Some are quite tame, while others would make a sailor blush," he said.
While surfing for sound file sites myself, I found a few great ones. At the EARchives, I found sounds from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Now, whenever I get a message, Eric Idle is struck by an arrow and groans "Message for you, Sir!"
At half-past the hour, one of the Replicants from Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" tells me, "Wake up! Time to die."
Sound files are fun, but they can be dangerous. Overdosing on downloads can result in a fatal hard-drive crash. Have fun, but be careful.
