Ed Bott reports that the Windows Vista operating system sounds have been revealed, and this time it's real, unlike the very funny joke that went around a few days ago. All the secrecy surrounding these sounds really doesn't make a lot of sense once you hear them. Composer Robert Fripp put together the package of sounds, which can probably best be described as subtle. In fact, many of them are so subtle, that I had to turn my volume up 70% to even hear them in comparison to their Windows XP counterparts. Of course, some of this could be attributable to the volume balance in the recording, but some also has to do with the nature of the sounds; there's simply very little attack on the sounds that will be used in Windows Vista, in comparison to XP's sounds which jump out at you a bit more.

I'm not yet sure how I feel about this; while never really a fan of XP's sounds, the Vista sounds feel sort of gutless to me. Maybe subtlety in sound is more appropriate these days with all of the visual feedback we get from our rich GUI operating systems and applications. I don't know.

What do you think?