Tempo, pitch, and melody can affect how quickly you respond to audio notifications
Have you ever sat down at your computer after a long day of procrastinating, finally ready to work, when you get a loud annoying phone notification? Ugh, its your cousin sending you another cat video. Instantly you are distracted, good luck working now. Or maybe you have been in the zone all day, getting tons of work done, so focused that you’re brain doesn’t register the notification that you missed 2 hours ago reminding you about an important group meeting, oops. We’ve all experienced poorly designed audio notifications. Some sound patterns make you cringe, and others go unnoticed by your brain. Is there a science to this? Are their patterns in the way our brain responds to these obnoxious alarms and mild melodies?
Fu-Yin Cherng and her colleagues set out to answer this very question. They were interested in manipulating the musical parameters of notification noises to study how humans react to different combinations of these parameters. So they conducted a set of two studies to explore how pitch, melody, and tempo effect the way we perceive sound, the way we behave, and how we shift our attention.
For their first study, they asked 21 subjects to watch a silent movie with subtitles, while a mixture of ambient noise and randomized audio notifications played in their ears. There were 8 different variations in audio, ranging from “simple, low, slow” to “complex, high, fast” and subjects were told specifically to ignore the audio. They collected each subject’s brain data throughout the movie watching experience. Because subjects were told not to pay attention to the audio, the passive brain recordings were captured quite naturally. From this study they learned that raising the pitch can help people recognize notifications more easily, raising the tempo can help people recognize them sooner, and raising the pitch while slowing the tempo basically cancels out both effects. They also found that when the sound had a more complex melody, you would need to raise the pitch and tempo at the same rate to see people respond more quickly.
The second study was much larger — they recruited 967 online subjects. So, rather than measuring brain signals, behavioral data was collected using keyboard clicks. Once again subjects were asked to watch a silent movie, but this time they were asked to remember the visual content of the movie. They were also given a second task, which was to hit “Ctrl” on their keyboard when the heard an audio notification. The idea behind this duel-task situation was to see which task the subject prioritized, and what their response time was for recognizing the notification. Subjects were also asked to report their demographic, environmental, and experience information. Once again, they found people responded more quickly to fast tempo audio, and people more accurately identified a high pitch audio notification than a low pitch one. With these results being similar to the earlier study, the findings are convincing.
The team also found some other interesting findings after analyzing the results within the context of subject demographics and environment. They found that elders responded faster than adults, and women responded faster and more accurately than men, and people participating in the study in a private location responded faster and more accurately than those in public settings. People who used audio notifications regularly in their daily lives, responded more quickly to the audio notifications.
So what can we do with this information now that we know it? Maybe we can use it to set up specific audio notifications for different applications. Maybe it would be good to have a low pitch, slow tempo audio notification for texts from your cousin so you workflow isn’t interrupted by cat videos. Maybe you could set your calendar reminder to be high pitched and fast tempo to make sure you don’t miss a meeting even when you are laser focused. Hear me out — our brains react to small differences in audio, so maybe making small changes using this information will lead to more productivity.
Read the full paper here!
Cherng, F. Y., Lee, Y. C., King, J. T., & Lin, W. C. (2019, May). Measuring the influences of musical parameters on cognitive and behavioral responses to audio notifications using EEG and large-scale online studies. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–12).
