Beep: Listening to the Digital Watch

Abstract

This essay considers the intertwined histories of the word “beep” and the simple, single-oscillator tone by examining the digital watch of the late 1970s–early 1980s. The watch and its beep marked a key economic and technological development in which the US, as global hegemon and economic powerhouse, was not the dominant agent. They also prefigured the tinkling sound of ringtones on mobile phones and initiated the mass mundanization of digital beeps, now shorn of the symbolic power of recondite, expensive, and classified Cold War-era technologies. The watch beep’s hardwired nature allows us to hear connections between that historical moment’s different temporal scales, direct linkages between which would soon be imperceptible thanks to the digital economy’s ever increasing abstraction.