In the age of rapidly emerging technology, there have been a ton of strange noises and jingles signifying machine startup, shut down, and errors. These strange fragments of noise tend to cause irrational fear in people. For me, it is the Windows 95 startup noise (some of Brian Eno’s best work.) For others it might be old Mac crash noises.
These sounds exist in gaming as well. The original Xbox had faint mechanical sounds hidden in the console dashboard, sounding almost alien — turns out some of the sounds were conversations from Apollo missions. There’s the PS2’s Red Screen of Death, which would appear if you inserted a disc the PS2 couldn’t read. The BIOS of the console already had ambient atmospheric music and noise, but the dreaded red screen had a very negative atmosphere, driven home by the red clouds, descending music and distant wave noises. Sega CD games had an audio track embedded into it that would play if the user inserted the disk into a CD player. It consists of a stern sounding woman with an urgent warning and dissonant distorted guitar chords echoing in the background. Definitely not a very nice warning.