> The statistics say that most of these alarms are not indications of peril
That's because they are CYA lawsuit deflectors.
An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#72I 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 wo…
I found the fitbit watch vibration alarm to be very gentle.
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#73There should be away for users to combine alarms with and/or blocks in hospitals. That way the cacophony would be reduced to the important cases.
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#74In my freshman year in college, a student was killed by a slow moving freight train while walking between the dorm and the campus. We all wondered how it possibly could have happened.
A few months later we understood. The first few times you see a bellowing metal beast with its horn blaring, you can't help but to watch out for it. A few hundred safe encounters later and it actually becomes very easy to ignore it. There were some other near misses that year.
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#75I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only…
Certain apps curtail the "turning alarm off and going back to sleep without realizing it" problem. Sleep as Android has a feature where you need to perform a conscious task (math problem / tap on X jumping sheep / etc). Sure you might still solve the math problem and go back to sleep, but there is no doing multi-operational math subconsciously. You're going to know you are awake and will remember.
You'd be surprised. I tried the multiplication of two-digit numbers puzzle and very quickly I became pretty proficient at solving math problems in a semi-conscious state...
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#76Along 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…
All I can hear is my A-10 Simulator saying, "ALTITUDE, ALTITUDE!" in what seems like a calm female voice, but I can't un-hear it.
15-20 years ago, I played one that kept saying "OVER-G!" I didn't hear that, though, I heard "Aubergine!"
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#77I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only…
Sprinkling carpet tacks on your floor would have cured that one.
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#78The most distressing sound I know is the Shepard–Risset glissando, also known as the Barber-pole sound because it seems to continuously drop in frequency. Wikipedia has an audio sample [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
That's pretty good, but I think the Chicago tornado sirens are more hair-raising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_oX6SURRE
http://www.federalwarningsystems.com/sites/default/files/dow...
It's Federal Signals' "Alternate Wail" setting for their outdoor warning products. Multiple overlapping arrays making this sound is (as you can tell) very effective at making people take shelter.
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#79The most distressing sound I know is the Shepard–Risset glissando, also known as the Barber-pole sound because it seems to continuously drop in frequency. Wikipedia has an audio sample [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
FWIW that sound doesn't bother me at all. Totally meh.
Perhaps you've had some musical training, so you're more sensitive to this effect?
In comparison, the tornado sirens someone linked to are really noticeable and annoying to me.
Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice" And according to that wikipedia link, most of it was wrong or conflicting!
I feel like cursing should also have been considered.
Could have sworn there is a celebrity voice add-on for some vehicle GPS that is just that.