NBC Chimes - An Elegant Solution: The Station Break

An Elegant Solution: The Station Break

The chimes were originally conceived to help solve a problem inherent in early network radio broadcasting: the vast majority of which was live, rather than pre-recorded. At the top of each hour, any individual broadcaster (on radio, TV or other broadcast band) must identify itself by callsign and the name of the community where its broadcast license has been issued, in compliance with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations. For example: "This is WHYY, Philadelphia." Therefore it might seem efficient for a small radio network (three to seven stations, for instance) to accomplish this chore by having a single announcer "on the network", whose voice is transmitted to all the local stations, read the short list of local callsigns and corresponding communities for about ten seconds each hour, during an extended broadcast period. However, this practice becomes quite inefficient as a network grows, consuming valuable commercial airtime. Hence it was determined in early big-network radio days that this job, among others, had to be done locally, on a pre-determined cue from the network itself.

The simplest way to accomplish this is with a spoken announcement (sometimes called an outcue), and its special format has a familiar ring. For instance: "We pause now for ten seconds for station identification: this is the NBC Television Network". This phrasing alerts a local announcer to put him/herself on the air and formally identify the local station. The Today Show, broadcast for four hours live every weekday on NBC, uses a special spoken outcue for station breaks: "This is Today on NBC." Indeed, as a public relations technique, this task is often offered to a member of the live audience assembled in Rockefeller Plaza outside the Today studio. For the network pioneers at NBC in the late 1920s, a more simple, elegant and consistent solution than an announcer's voice, with its individual distinctiveness, was sought.

It was decided by a three-person committee (consisting of Oscar Hanson, a former engineer of AT&T, Earnest la Prada, an NBC orchestra leader, and the NBC announcer Philip Carlin) that the simplest way to do this would be to create a musical cue which would sound to signal the end of programs. Essentially, NBC wished to brand itself in sound, a sound that any listener would immediately recognize.