Beep Speek

Are beeps annoying you more and more these days? They are me. A beep is a machine's way of saying "Hey!". When beeping machines were rare, a simple Hey could carry meaning. No more. Today I'm surrounded by machines, each one wanting my attention for who knows what.

"Hey!", one says, then "Hey!" again.

"Hey what?" I'd like to say, but, I know it's not listening.

-- WardCunningham

My machine made a new beep last night. It clearly said "Uh oh", in a squeaky little voice. I jumped about eight feet. Arrgh! -- RonJeffries

It sounds like you have ICQ installed, it "Uh oh"s every time a message arrives. First setting I change whenever I need to install it somewhere, without doubt. -- Canis

I believe they snatched the sound from Worms. The worms made that sound whenever they tripped a mine or something similar happened.

Supermarket scanners remind me of video games. That may just mean I've seen mostly primitive video games. -- AndrewKoenig

Telephones ringing, numbers winking, microwaves bleating, pagers vibrating madly, all these damned machines screeching, as Ward says, "Heh!" as though whatever I'm doing or thinking or dreaming right now could never be as important as whatever this unmannered device has been programmed to assault me with. The impudence! The gall! The absolute nerve! What? Oh, uh, excuse me, I've got to empty the clothes dryer. -- DonOlson

Yeah! And how about those fluorescent bulb hums? Our placid kitchen becomes a tension-inducing zone whenever you flip on the overheads. Incandescents for me... -- KeithLiggett

Sounds like the slightly modern version of what TomDeMarco and TimLister have described in PeopleWare with regards to telephones and pa systems (RingerTape or WireCutter? are your friends). -- ThomasWeidenfeller (I should stop working for a telephone company...)

That bit about the fluorescent bulb hums reminds me of JoeVsTheVolcano, a generally mediocre movie but which is worth watching if only for the incredibly anti-productive office environment shown at the beginning of the film. -- DanHankins

Perfect Human Factors Design Example:

I would buy an Alarm Clock if the alarm made a sound like a dog getting ready to throw up. This sound ALWAYS wakes me up instantly!

Other sounds instantly wake other folk. For me, it would be the sound of a bicycle freewheeling. How about an alarm clock that you feed from your computer with a .WAV or .AU file?

I think some alarm-clocks will turn on an audio-tape player when the alarm rings, which is a good idea.

Or even better, in the space age we live in, you can have it play a CD. Some will even let you program what track! (This sounds sarcastic, and it is, but aimed at CD alarm clock manufacturers - I've seen those without this (to me) very obvious function). I recommend "Tommy's Holiday Camp" at full volume!.

At a HumanComputerInteraction conference some years ago, someone mentioned adding sound; a person from the audience said, "I don't like all those extra noises coming from my neighbors machine"; then someone piped in with...

"You want something really subtle. You don't pay attention to the sounds of people walking down the corridor, until you hear the unmistakable shuffle of your boss. You notice it right away, and nobody else does. That's the kind of sound effect you want."

Which reminds me of a generalization that I noticed a few years ago - computer programmers operate in saturated colors and sounds. The world operates in pastels and very unsaturated colors and sounds. Watching an artist arrange colors on the screen was instructive - the artist chose proximate, faded colors, where most computer people choose varied, saturated colors. The same thing is operating here with sounds.

-- AlistairCockburn

This is why developers' personal websites look absolutely dreadful 99% of the time -- NickFitzsimons

This is what EdwardTufte (in VisualExplanations) calls "the principle of smallest effective difference".

The "someone" at the HCI conference might have been ThomasFurness?. I seem to recall that he proposed personalized audible clues for airfighter cockpits. -- MichaelSchuerig

I seem to recall recalling what you seem to recall.... the recollection comes with the attached suggestion that the personalisation consist of the pilot's girlfriend murmuring in his ear.

That's right, computer programmers choose contrasted colors, but so do typographers, etc. We have to have contrast in order to read easily, distinguish between screens (I always use dialogs of different colors).

And yes, the sounds should be different depending on the situation. Most of the time, I use 5 or more different sounds in my programs.

But I think that often "multimedia" is not necessary. Why have a big WAV when you can have a simply-generated sound?

Sometimes a sharp, clear text-mode interface is exactly what is needed.

Well, sharp contrasts have their place, but obviously work only insofar as the environment allows the contrast to be meaningful. I know I spent some time reconfiguring my Win desktop themes so that I got a more subdued working environment (I would like to do more, but the mechanics of it all tend to be very time-consuming and often a bit frustrating). Sometimes I have had occasion to work in an office in a corridor filled with offices, and have been quite concentrated on some aspect of writing or whatever, only to be rudely jolted by a loud defaulted TADAAA as someone down the hall reboots.

(Not to mention some themes people program their cellular ring signals as these days...)

I like the note above by AlistairCockburn about sounds that are personally meaningful and so are filtered out as random background by others. This would work fine for personalized systems.

I am also reminded of the contrast between what we see in films (various control/command centers blaring and flashing with alarms) and the reality of often very quite and subdued emergency centers where the only sound is people talking to resolve whatever crisis is current. (Think emergency switchboards, military command centers, etc., where the designers have really bothered to study and implement workable solutions to this.)

I prefer technology to have the attitude of real world control centers, not the film versions... -- BoLeuf

I agree about electric lights but I find the most annoying sound is actually the cooling fan in the PC case. I'm seriously considering buying a laptop for the single reason that it's a damn sight (er... sound) nearer to silent.

: There are PC cooling fans specifically designed to be low-noise. I suggest looking at http://www.quietpc.com for them.

But as for the noises the computer itself makes, I wouldn't be without them. Used sparingly, and with unique sounds for different events - no generic "TADA!" - I hate that. The sounds let me monitor what's going on. For example, "build completed successfully" and "build failed" sounds let me run a build in the background, which may take quite a few minutes. I can spend those minutes reading or editing WikiWikiWeb instead of staring at filenames scrolling through the build progress window - but still know the minute that the build is done or needs fixin'.

The simple solution to the "I don't want to be bothered by the sound of my neighbour's computer" is headphones, which if you both have them, both stops your computers' sounds interfering with each other, and also blocks out other ambient sounds (see Alistair's comment on ear protectors).

And there's another advantage with that: If you're trying to concentrate on a task and BeepSpeek is distracting you, you can just take the 'phones off and throw them onto the desk in disgust, and continue uninterrupted. :)

Incidentally, despite being a coder, when I customize my colours, I prefer proximate and subtle colours to saturated primaries. But that could be because I spent three years studying design (graphic / multimedia, rather than software). -- Canis.

Does it still work?

I can't hear the cooling fan in the PC case over

the extremely noisy rattle in the air conditioning unit over my neighbor's cube
the cell phone three cubes away that plays "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" for about fifteen seconds because its owner left it on his desk in noisy mode while he went to a meeting Send the person whose fault that is to: http://2lmc.org/phone/
the programmer two cubes away who talks loudly on the phone all day
the constant interruptions from other people in other departments of the company asking me how something works because it's faster to ask me than to ReadTheFineManual or possibly expend a brain cell or two figuring it out
the impromptu design meetings (I am guilty of this as well) in people's cubes because there's no other place to go
the music coming out of my headphones as I try to drown out all of the above

Headphones are not conducive to collaboration; however, the extremely noisy cube environment is not conducive to concentration.

I prefer a silent computer anyway.

I'm an amateur musician, and sometimes use a PC to do MIDI sequencing in my home studio. But I'm moving away from that precisely because of the noise of the PC's fans (mine has THREE fans, or is it FOUR?!). (Of course there are other reasons to avoid PCs with music, such as the tendency to "fall into the interface" rather than stay focused on the music here and now; very easy to let our fancy tools get in the way...)

On a separate point, I have my Palm alarm 5 or 10 minutes before a meeting, which works nicely. But then I'm sitting in the meeting room and it reminds me again, and I always say "Yeah, yeah!" under my breath as I pull it out and tap to acknowledge the alarm. Sometimes I fantasize about a smart PDA with GPS that could tell when I had actually gone to the meeting and therefore not *bug* me about it... We're definitely developing relationships with our smart tools, but they aren't smart enough yet, and so they whine and cry like toddlers (I have one of these, too...).

It's amazing: Whenever I return from a meeting, the first thing MicrosoftOutlook does is pop up an urgent reminder (after a rather significant "thinking" delay) to say "you need to go to this meeting!!!" Of course, by that time the meeting is over. It's even past the scheduled end time. But I still get the urgent "reminder". -- jtg

In his story "Harrison Bergeron", KurtVonnegut has a near-future world where the government enforces equality among people by artificially handicapping the gifted. Tall people are forced to walk around stooped over; strong people have to wear weights, beautiful people have to wear masks, etc.

They force smart people to wear headsets that generate beeping and buzzing sounds at random intervals. This disrupts concentration, preventing smart people from thinking too clearly.

Whenever I hear a phone, beeper, PDA, or other device emitting sounds, it makes me think of "Harrison Bergeron".

-- KrisJohnson

My office has lots of ambient noise ... a whippoorwill, a pair of blackbirds, flocks of cockatoos, a rather large tree that swooshes in the wind, a cow moo-ing, and ... thankfully all this is outside my office, and not inside. As if that isn't enough, a pair of starlings or robins or something have set up a nest in the exhaust vent for my bathroom and I have to put up with the incessant racket of a newborn chick softly going cheep-cheep-cheep. Every now and again, I am awoken in the morning by the maniacal cackling of a kookaburra. All this goes away at night ... to be replaced by the monkey-like screeching of fruitbats squabbling in the branches. -- NegativeOne

A couple of rounds out of your trusty ol' Remington 870 would put a sure stop to that, y'know?

I just heard a CreatureFeep. Could it have come from my laptop?

Well, let's fight the problem!

For .tcshrc (in case you use tcsh):

 set nobeep

For .inputrc (helps if you use bash):

 set bell-style none

Or at least that's what I used for my unix-thing...

I do the "personalized audio environment" thing. A script keeps a registry of sounds and purpose-oriented nicknames ('transfer completed' is currently mapped to a chord, and 'transfer aborted' to a broken chord) and plays the appropriate thing when invoked. Since incoming email, instant messages, etc., all route their sound-playing through the script, I can create a "do not disturb" (or "do not disturb unless it's the important message I'm waiting for") mode without reconfiguring each program individually. Now I just need something worth concentrating on, to justify all this effort. -- DanielKnapp

 Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
 (C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.

 c:\>net stop beep

 The Beep service was stopped successfully.

Take that, you stupid box!!

[Doesn't anyone like R2-D2?]

Sure - when he's quiet.

"I don't think he likes you." "BEeepp?" "No; I don't like you either." "Booopp..."

I made my cell phone send my call sign in morse for it's default ring. That way I don't have to get it out and look at it to see if it's my phone ringing. Now that's real BeepSpeek...

Even though computers have had complex sound functionality for years, many programs still use the beep to communicate with users.

When you are running lots of programs that have a BeepInterface, it's kind of like the computer is constantly yelling "Hey!".

See BeepSpeek for an in-depth discussion.