Orange Makes Scam Calls Sound Like Irritating Music

'Scamcophony' trumpets the telco's cybersecurity offering

Scams, phishing expeditions, fraudulent notifications about parcels that don’t exist. Each contributes a discordant note to the tech-driven symphony of daily life.

French telco Orange coins the term “Scamcophony” to describe such irritations and weaves assorted beeps, bloops, buzzes and fuzz-tones into an avant-garde musical number to tout its Cybersecure protection service.

You can’t dance to it. Maybe just hang up and walk away.

The composition’s dissonant and disruptive, and of course that’s the point. Each note echoes the sick spirit of scammers, with synth-beats pounding into your frontal lobes like some mad Moby track best forgotten.

“We simply wanted to find an execution built around a very simple observation: being bombarded with cold calls and all kinds of phishing attempts is just hell,” Publicis Conseil creatives Alexandre Dourday and Alexandre Thiebaut tell Muse. “But we felt that, on its own, this wasn’t quite enough to make for a truly creative idea. We wanted to find a way to play with the sounds of phone calls and notifications, so the idea of turning them into music came quite naturally.”

Indeed, the sonic palette grows more annoying frame by frame. Sweet silence comes at the end, as the brand’s logo flashes on screen. It’s an unusual take, sans dialogue, that feels compelling because we’ve all been there, cursing the caller, wishing the hoaxes would stop.

“Having no dialogue doesn’t really become a constraint. If anything, it works in our favor,” say Dourday and Thiebaut. “It allowed us to focus on what was actually the biggest challenge: the music. People often say that music accounts for 50 percent of a film. Here, it’s much more than that, because it’s the very concept behind the film.”

“We needed the music to be harmonious, yet almost unbearable at the same time.”

Mission accomplished. Forget Moby. It’s more like free jazz crossed with electronica. (Yikes!) The weird tune helps drive intrigue as the tale unfolds, and most viewers should hang around for the big reveal.

Bradley Bell and Pablo Jones-Soler directed through production house Wanda. The initiative will run through month’s end on TV and VOD with social elements from Razorfish.

Related: Data Trackers Are Too Darn Clingy in Apple’s Privacy Spot