The telephone rings. The microwave oven reports that food is ready. A clock announces the hour. Someone's pager has been paged. The fax machine has run out of paper. Or something—anything—has happened in a wristwatch, or computer, or alarm system, or dishwasher.    And you don't know which, or what, or whose, because all you've really heard is (pardon the approximate transliteration): beep. Maybe it was beep beep . . . beep beep. If the television is on, you may not even be sure whether it was your phone or Jerry Seinfeld's. If you're at a business meeting, you may be one of a dozen mildly embarrassed people all reaching for your pockets at once.    Beep is just the beginning. We are surrounding ourselves with a cacophony of electronic sounds. Chirps, trills, hoots, shrieks—no, the old onomatopoeia can't capture these thin and perfect tones, and evolution doesn't seem to have prepared us for this particular assortment. They aren't the noises of the jungle. They're the noises of the human-factors laboratories.    At Timex, where they now sell "Beepwear" for the wrist, the engineers know they're limited by their tiny piezoelectric crystals, which vibrate in response to the tiny current from a very simple circuit. Wristwatch designers can only envy their counterparts at telephone companies, who can use little speakers and more complex circuits and make their pagers play "Hail to the Chief" when a message comes from the boss.    But musicianship isn't the goal anyway. "Everybody's beep sounds the same," says Phil Brzezinsky of Timex. "What we try to achieve in our products is, we want to make it as irritating as we possibly can, especially our wrist pager. We're always trying to crank up more sound."    A long, long time ago, telephones rang. They struck a pair of little metal gongs with a fast-moving hammer. This was the invention of Thomas J. Watson ("Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!"), improving on his and Alexander Graham Bell's previous noises, the "buzzer" and the "thumper." The distinct sound of the ringing telephone penetrated deeply into American consciousness for nearly a century, but in the spring of 1956, Bell Laboratories began field tests of a new sound, a "musical tone ringer," as it was optimistically called.    To smack those gongs with the little hammer took 85 volts; the transistorized tone ringer needed less than one. The 300 subjects of the field test, in Crystal Lake, Ill., mostly found the new sound "pleasant," after taking a week or so to get used to it. Strangely enough, an advantage was that they could easily distinguish their new telephones from ringing doorbells, alarm clocks and fire alarms. In 1956, ovens, wristwatches, and the contents of people's pockets tended to remain silent. Maybe now we are in the jungle after all, surrounded by all these new species and needful of more varied and sensible auditory cues. Even if we don't have perfect pitch, we're not completely tone deaf or rhythmically obtuse, most of us. If birders can learn to distinguish dozens of characteristic songs and telegraphers could handle Morse code, we should be able to cope with a few simple electronic warbles and trills.    "One of the advantages of auditory feedback is that it's 360 degrees," says Cynthia Sikora, a psychologist researching electronic sounds for Bell Labs, now the research arm of Lucent Technologies. "You don't have to be looking in a particular direction. It allows you to multitask and use your attention selectively. The problem with visual feedback is, you have to be attending."    On the other hand, our frequent confusion about electronic sounds suggests that they are somehow directionless. This turns out to be true, especially for the pure 2,000- or 4,000-hertz tones coming from a tiny vibrating crystal. A metal bell is a complex object, and it reverberates with a rich set of harmonics and overtones—and these, bouncing off walls, give a bit more information to a pair of human ears.    Several corporate research laboratories are devoting serious effort to creating different sounds for future telephones, computers and other devices. Bell Labs, for example, is constantly bringing people in to test new sounds. Or is it the people being tested? Recently members of groups were assigned different "personalized" rings and then asked to recognize them. "They were pretty good at doing some of them," says another researcher, Linda Roberts. "Other ones they couldn't tell." Even after going through the Familiarization Phase, the Learning Phase and the Test Phase. Rhythms were the easiest.    Roberts and Sikora have been experimenting with what they punningly call "earcons"—icons not for the eye. They have employed a professional sound designer and musician in New York to make the sounds brilliant and pleasant and identifiable. You might think in terms of (as they put it in a recent technical paper) "very short durations of program music that are created to steer the emotional reaction of the listener in support of the desired image." They have an almost infinite palette—but then again, sonic artists might feel constrained having to keep their creations shorter than two seconds, and often shorter than a half-second.    We navigate treacherous shoals here in the electronic world. At any moment you might be called upon to make an instantaneous decision: is it "join conference call" or "drop conference call"? Will you be able to identify the earcon ringing (and not exactly ringing) in your ears? Quick!    You can be sure that sometime soon, somewhere, an appliance will be speaking to you, and it will be saying, " . . . you will hear either a single beep, like this—beep—or two beeps, like this: beep beep." It will add, "After the beep, you may press pound."

First published in the New York Times Magazine 16 August 1998