
An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways - tintinnabula
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/an-alarm-designer-on-how-to-annoy-people-in-the-most-effective-ways
======
dfsegoat
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](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 the warning
system above everything else.

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitching_Betty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitching_Betty)

~~~
tome
That's really interesting!

And now and off-topic question: why would rolling right stop a plane from
going in the sea?

~~~
dfsegoat
Not a pilot or engineer - but I imagine if the plane were in a "banked left"
position (prolonged left roll) where altitude was being lost because of "slip"
\- then rolling right would restore lift / level flight

[http://2bfly.com/assets/slipinbank21.png](http://2bfly.com/assets/slipinbank21.png)

~~~
jenamety
likely just trying to get wings level. Likely triggered due to the high bank
angle plus low altitude.

PDF Warning: Page 121 - Aerodynamic Forces in Flight Maneuvers

[https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...](https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/phak/media/pilot_handbook.pdf)

------
js2
_The plane’s speed slowed to dangerous levels, activating the stall alarm—the
one, in the words of Popular Mechanics, “designed to be impossible to ignore.”
It blared the word “Stall!” 75 times. Everyone present ignored it._

Probably not:

 _In an article in Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche noted that once the angle
of attack was so extreme, the system rejected the data as invalid and
temporarily stopped the stall warnings. However, "this led to a perverse
reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time Bonin happened to lower
the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall
warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into
his pattern of pitching up" which increased the angle of attack and thus
prevented the plane from getting out of its stall._

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447)

~~~
digi_owl
> the system rejected the data as invalid

Thats like suddenly having your car freeze the speed gauge or something
because the speed would be absurd. Who the flip comes up with this things?!

~~~
slededit
You need to balance this with the ability to detect malfunctioning sensors.
Its not so trivial with that requirement.

------
raamdev
I 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 way to trick my brain into forcing me awake:
my subconscious has no way of knowing if it's an actual phone call that I need
to be awake for or if it's just the alarm, so it forces me awake to figure
that out. Its worked for years now.

~~~
squeaky-clean
I've had trouble getting up and staying awake forever. I was terrible in my
teens, my parents would actually throw water on me some mornings. Now I use an
alarm app (Sleep As Android, I'm sure there are others) that can choose
different puzzles and difficulties.

To turn off the alarm, I'd have to solve 3 problems like "2x5+14-6" without
getting any wrong. I eventually got really good at doing math in my sleep
apparently, because I overslept a few days after about a year of using it.
Later finding that my alarm was in the solved state.

Now I use the mode that makes you physically shake the phone a certain number
of times (and a certain amount of force) to turn off the alarm. I have it set
so it takes about 20 seconds of vigorous shaking, and by the end of it I'm
fairly awake.

I did the ringtone thing for a bit and it just made me really hate my
ringtone. I would never hear my alarm and go "maybe someone is calling", but I
would always hear my ringtone and go "Wtf, why is my alarm app...? oh..."

~~~
raamdev
I think working for a few years in IT roles where I was on call 24/7 in case a
server went down, where I worried that any call I got might be a disaster
call, trained my brain to always consider the sound of my phone ringing as a
possible emergency. I've been using the iPhone "Old Phone" ringtone for years
now and when my alarm goes off I usually catch it by the first or second ring
(confirmed by people who have actually called and woken me up). One other
thing I've learned is that if I use an ascending alarm, where the ringtone
starts quiet and slowly gets louder, it takes a _lot_ longer for me wake up,
presumably because my subconscious learns that an ascending ring is most
likely _not_ a phone call... my wife and daughter are awoken long before me if
I use an ascending alarm, but if I just use a normal one I'm able to wake up
and turn it off before it wakes them.

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dmckeon
A environment of multiple, repeating alarms - whether "Stall!" in a cockpit
every 3 seconds, or a hospital room with multiple beeps, with only 8 of 1455
especially significant, sounds to me to be like being a programmer trying to
fix a critical problem with a PHB manager hovering at one's shoulder, barking
"Another server crashed" and "Have you fixed it yet?" and similar several
times a minute.

Perhaps such environments could benefit from a button that silenced all
current alarms for at least 30 seconds, leaving the operator a brief quiet
time to focus, modulo new alarms.

Asking the annoying manager to go to some mildly distant place to find an
appropriate manual or checklist binder (that may even exist!) may work well
for some programmers and some managers.

For a more common example, spend a few minutes in the lobby of a busy or
understaffed McDonalds and listen to the cacophony of beeps.

~~~
CaptSpify
I wonder how much of this is "false alarms" as well. At my office, we had our
disk-alert thresholds way too low for a while. Our intent was good: "If
someone sees this and aren't busy, they'll jump on it when they get time". But
that just meant that everyone ignored the alert until it was too late. Now,
you don't want the threshold too high either, you have to find a balance.

signal-to-noise is hard.

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amelius
The 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone)

~~~
CarVac
That's pretty good, but I think the Chicago tornado sirens are more hair-
raising.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_oX6SURRE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_oX6SURRE)

~~~
fl0wenol
[http://www.federalwarningsystems.com/sites/default/files/dow...](http://www.federalwarningsystems.com/sites/default/files/downloads/AlternateWail.wav)

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.

------
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.

~~~
throwanem
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reveille)
\- has a playable sample

~~~
busterarm
I'm familiar. :)

I'm a heavy sleeper _and_ a dawdler though. The radio thing has the extra
effect of motivating me to get out as quickly as possible.

~~~
throwanem
Interesting point. I tend to dawdle in the morning a bit as well, but haven't
really put a lot of thought into adjusting that.

~~~
Fargren
My answer to dawdling has become to wake up an hour earlier, at the cost of
going to bed earlier. I like my lazy mornings.

~~~
throwanem
I get up at 5:30, which is already pretty early by anyone's lights except
maybe my mom, who's usually up by three. Certainly it's unusual in our
profession! I've long since grown accustomed to being the first of my team to
arrive at the office.

The real problem for me is wintertime, because then I have to wake up in the
dark. That just makes it super hard to get going in the morning.

------
russdill
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYcMcf-o3Zs](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw)

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

~~~
cyberferret
Air incident investigations have shown that under stress/duress, a pilot will
ignore things that seem stupidly obvious due to focusing on one aspect of the
crisis.

That first landing looked far from 'perfect'. He was coming in high and
possibly too fast, and I daresay he was focusing too much on how much runway
he would have left after landing. He could have also assumed that the warning
was the overspeed warning from extending landing flaps at too high a speed
(though most light aircraft don't have that warning system).

That second one was a lot less explicable - looked like a normal landing
approach. Surprised that the instructor also didn't pick it up.

Interestingly, that second pancake landing is in exactly the same type of
aircraft that I did my initial flying training in. Something about seeing that
instrument panel, and hearing that warning alarm made the hairs on the back of
my neck stand up, and raised my pulse a little. Even 25+ years after I last
flew that type!

------
slim
My favourite engineered sound is the sound of a 90' Nokia phone losing sight
of the infrared port when syncing. It's a very low frequency sound that made
me immediately realign the device the first time I heard it. I was amazed.

~~~
dognotdog
Sounds interesting. A quick googling fails to turn up anything, but I'd love
to hear it. Do you remember any specifics that might help finding The Sound?

------
bradknowles
Something I discovered years ago is that there are whole libraries of alarm
sounds. And companies like Apple have licensed many of the best known.

The problem occurs when you choose a phone alarm sound that is frequently used
in the industry for seriously nasty things. Like frequently used in many
movies for the biggest disaster that will be occurring, leaving you in a panic
to turn off the sound on your phone right in the middle of the most important
part of the movie.

Or, you work in the central IT Services department of a major university, and
you work in the building where the main computer room is located. And your
alarm sound happens to be the same one as used on the floor for the halon dump
fire suppression system. And you're standing at the doorway of a co-worker
talking to them, when your phone alarm goes off. And their office happens to
be right next to that of the datacenter manager.

So far as I know, there were no heart attacks or strokes that resulted from my
accidental use of the same alarm library sound that day. But I was strongly
incentivized to switch my alarm sound to something else.

------
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.

~~~
ascorbic
Anecdotally, around 19 kHz was the cutoff among most of my colleagues in their
mid 20s to mid 30s when I tested this a few years ago.

------
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.

~~~
Kluny
I was thinking the same thing. I don't want to wake up angry. When someone
figures out a way to wake me up that feels like being gently kissed by a loved
one, prodded by a dog, or the smell of frying bacon and fresh coffee, then
they'll really have something.

~~~
crooked-v
You can get coffee makers (including, I'm sure, K-cup variants) with timers.

The "bacon alarm clock" is also a real thing, being basically a timer-driven
toaster oven with precooked bacon in it, but that'd be a bit more worrying to
run automatically than just a coffee maker.

------
phailhaus
I wish this article about alarms had sounds that readers could play.

~~~
msielski
What, "d-d-d-d-d-duh," "duhhhh-duhhhhh-duhhhh," and "BREHHHHK BREHHHHK
BREHHHHK" didn't do it for you?

------
kevinskii
In 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.

------
LargeCompanies
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 smile or another positive emotion) happens on each use.
Also know the likes of each user and what's happening in their life.

I still believe it's a great idea/new form of communication that if done
correctly the masses would love, as when it wakes you up to something you
connect with you smile and or laugh; changing your morning routine for the
better! I wish Apple would allow a user the ability to wake up to a radio
URL!!!

~~~
a_c_s
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 laughter.

~~~
LargeCompanies
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...

------
1_2__3
The Air France example is not a good one - there's no indication the pilots
didn't hear or heed the warning, it's that a loud voice blaring "STALL!" was
only one of multiple "pay attention to me now" things in the cockpit. To claim
the alert needs to be more noticeable/annoying/loud/whatever is completely
wrong - they needed information, not alerts.

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algesten
> Above 20,000 Hz, she says, an alarm “starts sounding not really urgent, but
> like a squeak.”

Not sure it's even right to call it a squeak. Many adults hear nothing at
20,000 Hz.

------
Melchizedek
Just record the sound of an open-plan office.

~~~
kps
The article addresses that — a good alarm shouldn't interfere with getting
things done.

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

~~~
beart
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.

~~~
lostlogin
Good units don't just squawk out a beep, they fade in and out and have an
inoffensive tone. The pitch changes with increasing/decreasing heart rate.
These ones are good and the others need to die.

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jenamety
my favorite example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw)
I believe it's better to read the description after you watch the video.

------
cableshaft
I never really thought about the fact that alarms are researched and have
dedicated designers. This was a very interesting article, thanks for sharing
it.

I might have to start checking Atlas Obscura more often if they have articles
like this on it.

------
michael_h
Use the excite bike 'overheat' sound and use it sparingly.

------
kevin_thibedeau
> The statistics say that most of these alarms are not indications of peril

That's because they are CYA lawsuit deflectors.

------
hammock
So after reading the article, is the only way to evaluate an alarm through
human testing? Is there anywhere I can read more about theory of alarms? Very
interested in this, as well as how it might crossover to music and
songwriting.

------
Pica_soO
There 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.

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kw71
The alarm sound I like the best is the one that dutch ambulances use. I wonder
where I can buy such an emitter.

