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An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

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Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#31

Post by busterarm »

I'm notoriously bad about sleeping through alarms. I used to have to use 4 at a time.

The two most effective things that I've done to wake myself are:

a) I had my computer play a song with a high BPM at 100% volume on repeat starting on a timer. Shutting it off required typing a few commands to kill the process. This was effective for a while until I started sleeping through it too.

b) What I do now is I have a cheap clock radio. I set the radio dial to an ultra-conservative talk radio station and then superglued the dial in place. I also superglued the volume dial at its max position and broke off the snooze button. This is highly effective at getting me up and motivated to leave the house.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#32

Post by to3m »

"Most adults can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz" - 9 year old adults, perhaps...

I'm not an alarm designer, but my understanding is that if you want pretty much everybody to be able to hear something, not just your kids and your dog, 10-12KHz is a much better upper limit.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#33

Post by dwyerm »

dfsegoat wrote: post #2

Along these same lines, one of my favorite examples of this type of work (human factors related to attention/alerting) is "Bitchin' Betty" and company - the female voice that makes up the "oral alert system" from the F/A-18 superhornet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx7-yvXf6f8 A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice so that pilots would know to immediately pay attention to t…

This has always reminded me of Ben Rubin's (EAR Studio) early work on notification tones. One of his projects was the ticket gates in the NYC subway system.

Those high-pitched piezo speaker beepers are cheap and simple, but it is difficult to localize where the beep is coming from, and the single frequency can't communicate much. Mostly, you can't tell if your gate beeped, or the one next to you.

His solution was, among other things, to turn it from a beep to a bell tone. That alone made it better.

It seems like the audio design of things is often missed. I'm excited about products like Google's Home and Amazon's Echo because we're finally considering audio as a first-class user interface.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#34

Post by semi-extrinsic »

busterarm wrote: post #31

I'm notoriously bad about sleeping through alarms. I used to have to use 4 at a time. The two most effective things that I've done to wake myself are: a) I had my computer play a song with a high BPM at 100% volume on repeat starting on a timer. Shutting it off required typing a few commands to kill the process. This was effective for a while until I started sleeping through it too. b) What I do now is I have a cheap…

A friend of mine used to have a cheap alarm clock of tge type that rings indefinitely, placed between two metal baskets that he locked together with padlocks he'd thrown away the keys to. So he had to pick a padlock in order to turn off the alarm. Not only did he wake up early, he became a skilled lock picker.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#35

Post by LargeCompanies »

a_c_s wrote: post #29
LargeCompanies wrote: post #19

Many years ago I created a social alarm clock idea which was panned and hated.. lol. Though at the time I had no tech skills and never released our prototype. Personally being woken up to something funny, cute, meaningful from a friend or loved one was great. Though the challenge for this idea to work is you have to put restraints via audio volume levels to ensure a great experience (waking up laughing or with a smil…

Interesting idea, partly because it is the total opposite of what I want in an alarm clock: everyone's different! As a heavy sleeper I'm always groggy and not social when I get up. My perfect alarm clock would have a loud, blaring alarm (imagine what a movie alarm would sound like to indicate nuclear war or some other form of certain doom). I think I'd either be annoyed by or sleep through something cute like laughte…

Well then you could tell your friends to choose loud, crazy and fun alarms and or choose the option to crank up the volume.

I keep thinking I should get back to working on it and finish it the way I described above...

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#36

Post by beart »

sumoboy wrote: post #10

Hospital monitors beeping all the time are so annoying, stressful. Last visit I just turned off the machine I was annoyed.

The last time I was in the hospital, the sound was only really ever used when the nurse or doctor was present in the room. It allowed them to monitor the status of the patient without having to stare at a display. All other times, the sound was typically turned way down or even muted as they were monitoring an independent readout in another room.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#37

Post by cpeterso »

I don't want my alarm clock to annoy me. I just want it to wake up. I'd like an alarm with a gentler, pulsing sound that only gets louder or more annoying if you don't get up soon.

I found an Android alarm app that tried to wake you when you're in a shallow sleep phase. IIRC, the app would quietly ring 45, 30, and 15 minutes before the wake time you set, so if you happened to be in a shallower sleep phase then you would wake more naturally. I stopped using it, though, because the phone UI was too annoying to use as an alarm clock.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#38

Post by throwanem »

busterarm wrote: post #31

I'm notoriously bad about sleeping through alarms. I used to have to use 4 at a time. The two most effective things that I've done to wake myself are: a) I had my computer play a song with a high BPM at 100% volume on repeat starting on a timer. Shutting it off required typing a few commands to kill the process. This was effective for a while until I started sleeping through it too. b) What I do now is I have a cheap…

Consider the bugle call "Reveille" [1], which has a long history of being used to wake the potentially recalcitrant. I've used it as a wake alarm for several years now, replacing the classic iOS "Alarm" tone that I used to use - "Reveille" is considerably less jarring, but I've found it much more effective in producing a transition from sleep to wakefulness that doesn't include the shock produced by something like "Alarm" - or the anger I'd surmise is produced by your method B above.

Works for me, at least. Might be worth a try for you, too. I should think almost anything would be preferable to the self-abuse of loud talk radio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reveille - has a playable sample

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#39

Post by russdill »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYcMcf-o3Zs

Anyone hear a weird beeping noise? Wonder what it could mean...oh well, I'm sure it's not important, we're about to land anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw

Geez that sound is annoying, I hope it stops soon.

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