Improving auditory alarms: Reducing perceived annoyance with musical timbre (a randomized trial)

Background Auditory alarms in medical environments are widely criticized due to problematic design issues affecting learnability, recognition, and annoyance. To overcome these issues, new alarm sets vary properties like pitch, timing, and timbre—the “quality” of a sound. Past work identifies timbre as a promising candidate for improving alarm recognition, however most studies manipulate multiple acoustic parameters, obfuscating the independent …