A Bug and a Crash
Guess what caused the expensive crash
of the Ariane 5 in 1996. And what does it say about software
design?
The End of Cash
Make way for digibucks, cybercash, e-bills,
and the rest. If we're going to have digital money, what's the right kind
of digital money?
Microspeak
"Design side effects"? "Known issues"?
How they talk (and why).
The Doctor's Plot
You don't believe people are being abducted
by aliens, do you? Wacky belief manias are a truly destructive force in our
society.
The telephone
rings. The microwave oven reports that food is ready. A clock announces the
hour. Someone's pager has been paged. The fax machine has run out of paper.
Or something—anything—has happened in a wristwatch, or computer,
or alarm system, or dishwasher.
And you don't know which, or what, or whose, because all you've
really heard is (pardon the approximate transliteration): beep. Maybe
it was beep beep . . . beep beep. If the television is on, you may
not even be sure whether it was your phone or Jerry Seinfeld's. If you're
at a business meeting, you may be one of a dozen mildly embarrassed people
all reaching for your pockets at once. Beep is just the beginning. We are surrounding ourselves
with a cacophony of electronic sounds. Chirps, trills, hoots, shrieks—no,
the old onomatopoeia can't capture these thin and perfect tones, and evolution
doesn't seem to have prepared us for this particular assortment. They aren't
the noises of the jungle. They're the noises of the human-factors laboratories.
At Timex, where they now sell "Beepwear" for the wrist, the
engineers know they're limited by their tiny piezoelectric crystals, which
vibrate in response to the tiny current from a very simple circuit. Wristwatch
designers can only envy their counterparts at telephone companies, who can
use little speakers and more complex circuits and make their pagers play
"Hail to the Chief" when a message comes from the boss.
But musicianship isn't the goal anyway. "Everybody's beep sounds
the same," says Phil Brzezinsky of Timex. "What we try to achieve in our
products is, we want to make it as irritating as we possibly can, especially
our wrist pager. We're always trying to crank up more sound."
A long, long time ago, telephones rang. They struck a pair of
little metal gongs with a fast-moving hammer. This was the invention of Thomas
J. Watson ("Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!"), improving on his and Alexander
Graham Bell's previous noises, the "buzzer" and the "thumper." The distinct
sound of the ringing telephone penetrated deeply into American consciousness
for nearly a century, but in the spring of 1956, Bell Laboratories began
field tests of a new sound, a "musical tone ringer," as it was optimistically
called.
To smack those gongs with the little hammer took 85 volts; the
transistorized tone ringer needed less than one. The 300 subjects of the
field test, in Crystal Lake, Ill., mostly found the new sound "pleasant,"
after taking a week or so to get used to it. Strangely enough, an advantage
was that they could easily distinguish their new telephones from ringing
doorbells, alarm clocks and fire alarms. In 1956, ovens, wristwatches, and
the contents of people's pockets tended to remain silent.
Maybe now we are in the jungle
after all, surrounded by all these new species and needful of more varied
and sensible auditory cues. Even if we don't have perfect pitch, we're not
completely tone deaf or rhythmically obtuse, most of us. If birders can learn
to distinguish dozens of characteristic songs and telegraphers could handle
Morse code, we should be able to cope with a few simple electronic warbles
and trills.
"One of the advantages of auditory feedback is that it's 360
degrees," says Cynthia Sikora, a psychologist researching electronic sounds
for Bell Labs, now the research arm of Lucent Technologies. "You don't have
to be looking in a particular direction. It allows you to multitask and use
your attention selectively. The problem with visual feedback is, you have
to be attending."
On the other hand, our frequent confusion about electronic sounds
suggests that they are somehow directionless. This turns out to be true,
especially for the pure 2,000- or 4,000-hertz tones coming from a tiny vibrating
crystal. A metal bell is a complex object, and it reverberates with a rich
set of harmonics and overtones—and these, bouncing off walls, give a
bit more information to a pair of human ears.
Several corporate research laboratories are devoting serious
effort to creating different sounds for future telephones, computers and
other devices. Bell Labs, for example, is constantly bringing people in to
test new sounds. Or is it the people being tested? Recently members of groups
were assigned different "personalized" rings and then asked to recognize
them. "They were pretty good at doing some of them," says another researcher,
Linda Roberts. "Other ones they couldn't tell." Even after going through
the Familiarization Phase, the Learning Phase and the Test Phase. Rhythms
were the easiest.
Roberts and Sikora have been experimenting with what they punningly
call "earcons"—icons not for the eye. They have employed a professional
sound designer and musician in New York to make the sounds brilliant and
pleasant and identifiable. You might think in terms of (as they put it in
a recent technical paper) "very short durations of program music that are
created to steer the emotional reaction of the listener in support of the
desired image." They have an almost infinite palette—but then again,
sonic artists might feel constrained having to keep their creations shorter
than two seconds, and often shorter than a half-second.
We navigate treacherous shoals here in the electronic world.
At any moment you might be called upon to make an instantaneous decision:
is it "join conference call" or "drop conference call"? Will you be able
to identify the earcon ringing (and not exactly ringing) in your ears?
Quick!
You can be sure that sometime soon, somewhere, an appliance
will be speaking to you, and it will be saying, " . . . you will hear either
a single beep, like this—beep—or two beeps, like this: beep
beep." It will add, "After the beep, you may press pound."
First published in the New York Times
Magazine 16 August 1998
