rung tones

My phone's looking nicely aged now, and I've been trying to equip it with appropriate sounds, or at least sounds that I like. And I've been trying to make some of my own. I'd been veering towards trying to use more natural sounds. I've always been struck by the crossing signal sounds in Amsterdam. They sound like a woodpecker, like there's something inside the traffic light hammering on it, and I like that. (That's probably how it works). And I once saw a Japanese train guard using two large, quite resonant blocks of wood to signal departure, instead of a whistle. I was trying to avoid more digital swoops and bleeps and get something more organic. What a pathetic hippy.

And it really wasn't working.

The sounds were nice coming out of the laptop but they didn't work in context. They were too pallid and natural to be useful as alerts. It was like a fire engine trying to get people out of the way by plucking on a mandolin. I couldn't hear them if the phone was in my pocket, and if it was on my desk they were drowned out by the vibrating. I wish I'd read Chris's notes on The Design Of Future Things first, because it's clear I was pursuing the Don Norman Natural Sounds Fallacy:

"p59: Natural Interaction

Although simple tones and flashes of white or colored light are the easiest ways for designers to add signals to our devices, they are also the least natural, least informative, and most irritating of means. A better way to design the future things of everyday life is to use richer, more informative, less intrusive signals: natural signals. Use rich, complex, natural lights and sounds…

Like what? This is one of the most irritating passages. The only example is ‘the sound of boiling water’, which is trite, as it’s actually water boiling in a kettle. If you start using ‘natural’ notifications, they aren’t natural to the task in hand, and are therefore a learnt association. This is just how it has to be for intangible interactions. Even the most natural – a ringing bell of a phone call – is a learnt sound, from over a century of use. Notifications are a Hard Problem, given the palette of interactions we can use and the design constraints."

He's completely right. This is a really hard problem. You don't hear a gently knocked woodblock in a crowded cafe because a) you're not tuned to that sort of sound as an alert and b) it's not sonically distinctive in that environment. It just melts into the ambience. The sweet spot is un-natural enough to be ear-catching but subtle enough not to be jarring or embarrassing. And, learnt association is really powerful and useful here, as this Nextel example illustrates (bottom of the article) (via Intentional Audio).

I tried experimenting with almost all of these, really interesting sounds, made by some of my favourite sound people. And, again, they didn't work. Too subtle to be noticed unless they were loud. Or too jarring to be socially acceptable. This, for instance, is a lovely noise. Gentle, organic (ish, in that it's a bell). But it's drowned out by vibration and in a noisy environment you don't hear the bell striking, it just sounds like a high whine. And this, even more organic noise has much the same problems.

I guess as technology learns to be social it's also got to learn to be polite. And the best way for a sound to be polite is for you to be able to hear it, but no-one else. And you can't do that with volume, you have to create something that's personal and relevant to the listener - something they're attuned to, like the way you can hear your own name through a drone of conversation.

So, I thought a good thing would be to use sounds that meant something in particular to me. I stole/edited/made this (which is my favourite guitar noise ever) and found this (which is everyone's favourite robot noise). This seems to work well. I'm tuned to these noises so I notice them at a lower volume than I would a preloaded alert. Which means they're less intrusive to everyone else. And I notice them because they're musical, they feature change and tension and release, but incredibly compressed into a short period of time and a narrow tonal range.

I suppose, as we start to create more devices that are designed to hover at the edge of our attention music could have more of a role to play in 'ambient alerting'. We don't have to learn the musical cues for 'be anxious' or 'be excited' or 'calm down' or 'he's a baddy' - we've been trained in them by lifetimes of movies etc. It's more comprehensible than flashing lights.

I'm glad I tried making sounds though. When you've got all these digital tools in your laptop you're often tempted to think you can do anything. It reminded me that you can't just diletante your way into some things. Some things are just hard. It makes you realise how clever all these people are.

Comments

[Zach]

Hmm, one thing about natural sounds is that some have evolved to be heard (bird calls, dog howls, elephant trumpets) but most have not (gurgling water). No wonder the non-evolved ones are soothing and hard to pick out.

I would also suspect fidelity/realness has something to do with it. I have a cheap little microwave that I love because it has a real bell inside. How hard was that? And yet the expensive ones seem afraid to have anything non-electronic.

Anyways, this is good:
http://www.amazon.com/Tuning-World-R-Murray-Schafer/dp/0394409663
The first half is a brilliantly researched history of the soundscape from the womb through the industrial revolution and up till the 1970s.

[Mark Hadfield]

Great post Russell.

Another thing that has always struck me about ringtones is the fact that no matter which tone you end up with you always end up resenting it.

Being a massive Floyd fan myself I don't think I could ever have a Floyd riff as a ringtone. I'd come to associate it with people ringing me up and moaning at me. Even worse, I'd come to dread it.

By using it as a ringtone we're putting the choice to listen to it in someone else's hands. I want to listen to Floyd when I'm in the mood. Too often, and in the wrong situation, and it just becomes music. And Floyd is so much more than that. And yo usaid you were hippy...

I've actually gone down the cliche route and kept a really old bleepy bloppy song like a mid-90s dance song.

Mark

[moosatov]

Personally, I don't have such a problem because I'm using the best phone ever - Nokia 3310 - and every ringtone of it will be heard, especially, in the age when everyone has polyphonic ringtones.
However, if I had poly-phone, I would use 8bit ringtone:
http://www.8bitpeoples.com/

[Jim]

Really interesting.

I can't say I'm huge fan of glam rock, but I enjoyed the sense of occasion when someone rang me to the opening crunches of T Rex's '20th Century Boy.'

[Jim Holt]

Maybe we need phones that listen to the ambient sounds around us and create ringtones on the fly that in some way contrast with the general hubbub, with a volume relevant to the amount of surrounding noise, and with some sort of taste factor so that the created sounds fit with your acoustic ideals and are recognisable as your own and not the person sat next to you. I'm sure it can be done with a bit of solder and some wires.

[nathan]

based on his comments about watching movies on the iPhone, I made this david lynch ringtone:
http://www.rubbishcorp.com/rubbishblog/2008/01/23/david-lynchtones/

[charles]

Anybody know where I can find a ring tone consisting of 3 Japanese wood block sounds followed by a gong sound and then three wood block sounds.