They’re everywhere, seeming since the advent of electronics beeps have been used. Why?
In: Technology
Characteristically, a beep is a single tone that has a simplistic waveform, usually a sine wave or square wave. These types of audio signals are really easy to generate with super super basic hardware (think 1 or may be 2 transistors max, plus a few resistors and a capacitor) and so they’ve been used for decades in electronics, for signalling things like errors (a beep is hard to ignore) or things like button presses.
They are made by a tiny speaker, either on the motherboard of the device itself, or in the case itself (wired to the motherboard).
Originally, beeps were used because they are very easy to create. Run voltage through a speaker wire at a specific wavelength and, bam, a beep. Much, much easier to do than complicated sounds like speech or music.
As to _why_ they beep, the beeps tell you that the computer is doing something without needing a display attached – beeping when the computer boots up tells you the computer booted up _before_ the display drivers initiate, so you can at least know the motherboard is booting.
When something is wrong with hardware and it cannot boot normally, the pattern of beeps can hint you what part exactly malfunctions.
If your PC beeps when everything is OK, then, well, it’s just another pattern, telling you that the parts, one by one, are OK. So in that case if something isn’t right, someone who knows the beeps code can listen and figure out like “uh-huh, the chipset is OK, the CPU is OK, oh, the RAM isn’t, let’s check it”.
its a simple electronic component, doesnt require any drivers installed or a sound card to be present. you just signal to the buzzer to… make a sound.
Most computers have a piezoelectric speaker, this is a very simple speaker that is not capable of creating varying sounds, just different levels of a beep/buzz noise. But it has the advantage of being very cheap, compact and easy to use. This is the same kind of speaker you’ll find in alarm clocks, microwaves, digital watches, etc..
Computers in the past used to use these piezoelectric speakers as their main speakers, as they weren’t powerful enough to play normal sounds/music. These days, these tiny speakers are only used for diagnostics. If the computer can’t turn on far enough to startup the video hardware, it will play a certain pattern of beeps to indicate what’s wrong.
ELI5? A general purpose computer typically goes through a process called POST (power on self test) which comes before any output to a screen. The only way to communicate a problem found in POST is to beep at you. Some computers have POST lights on the front in lieu of or addition to beeping. There is nothing more maddening than walking through a DC and trying to find what is beeping.
You’re computer has a tiny speaker on the motherboard, it does just the beeps.
Those beeps are most often tied to POST – Power On Self-Test, where your computer does a basic check “do I have memory? Is there storage? Is there powersupply? A CPU? Good, BEEP” If you took out your RAM and tried to start your computer you’d get a noticeably different set of beep noises than if you had no storage drives.
Generally speaking the beeps tend to follow the manufacturer’s code for an issue, although these days it seems to be pretty similar across them all now.
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