Voyager computer beeps - Sinclair Studios

I wanted some custom sounds for my Home Assistant's voice assistant beeps, and Star Trek Voyager's computer has a good set of simple beeps for announcements, acknowledgements and other interactions.

Sourcing

There's a variety of Star Trek sound effects at TrekCore.com. This was my starting point. I downloaded the "VOY Door Chime 1" and used Audacity to break down the beep into a 10ms sample.

A screenshot from Audacity showing a 10ms audio waveform — Cropping a single beep pulse, cropped so the sine wave can loop perfectly.

The 10ms sample makes a "chirp" sound, and needs to be looped.

Then with GarageBand and the AU Sampler, it's possible to use it as a MIDI instrument with pitch control. Since the sample loops, the envelope settings are very simple:

Attack: 0.05s. Allows each beep to fade in quickly, reducing the sudden impact at the start of each beep.
Hold time: 60s. Allows for long beeps that don't decay or sustain.
Release time: 0.4. Allows each beep to fade out, simulating a mechanical resonance.

Garageband window, showing notes played using a sampler instrument — This custom software instrument uses the built-in AU Sampler plugin.

Beeps

Then cue up and export some beep variations using an instrument based on the sampler:

Announce (f#, f#, c#)
Acknowledge, todo (g#, d#, d#)
Acknowledge, doing (g#, d#, g#)
Acknowledge, done (d#, g#, g#)
Response, positive (d#, d#)
Response, negative (g#, g#)
Separator (f#)

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