When every sound is too loud

Whenever even a small group of people get together it quickly happens that two or more of the attendees try to speak at the same time. The result is the same whether this happens in a football stadium, a corporate boardroom or a family gathering: the speech of one or even all the speakers gets garbled by the rest of the messages which, in this case, are signals that become the noise. In engineering terms this is known as a collision in the media: two or more messages (the words of each speaker) access simultaneously the transmission media (in this case they are transmitted into the air of the room) with the results of mutual interference (listeners will hear both message) and the subsequent risk of losing their content (a misunderstanding).

In the case of most natural languages there is a lot of redundancy in the syntax: not every possible combination of sounds is meaningful; some words are repeated in close proximity, so losing one instance will not undermine the content; some words contain information about other words, so that even if you lose a portion of a word you can reconstruct the missing part from the context. However, this has an impact on the achievable transmission speed because every instant devoted to repeating old information cannot be used for the transmission of new one. That is why in applications where transmission speed is important, instead of increasing the redundancy to allow more than one simultaneous transmission (as if you were to speak louder in the boardroom), the frequent resort is arbitrating the permission to transmit (equivalent to having a moderator).

Photo: LaVladina

To some extent, our attention is equivalent to a transmission channel, because the fact that a physical stimulus reaches our sensory organs (sound in our ears, light in our eyes, touch on our skin) is not enough for the message to reach our mind without alteration. We have all had experiences of realizing that we have heard some noise several seconds after the fact because we were focus on something else, or that we have seen the keys to the car somewhere but did not register exactly where that was. This is the effect of the attention, which acts as a mediator between our senses and our mind allowing us to pay attention to some of them and not to the others.

In the early days of the telephone this need for attention quickly became apparent: nobody would spend their days sitting next to the receiver in case a call came in, so they equipped the device with a very loud ringing. When the connection was manual, the operator at the switchboard had a crank to activate the bell on the recipient side, later on this process became automated. In fact, the ringing tone used to be powered by the same current that activated the ringing at the destination. This was an important feedback because it allowed to determine if there was a receiver on the other side or not: if you dialed a number that did not exist you would not hear a ringing tone, because there will be no device to close the circuit.

When the first portable phones started to reach the market they were literally portable versions of the home devices: it had two functions (calling and receiving calls) and one means to get you attention (the ringer). The introduction of miniature electronics and digital technology powered a host of new functions in the cell phones, such as personal phone books and the Short Message Service (SMS), but the ringer was still the main way for the device to call for our attention. So much so that phones started to ring not only for calls but also for short messages.

The problem with this approach is that cell phones soon were present in places where phones were not supposed to be, such as classrooms, temples and movie theaters and, being as loud as their fixed counterparts, this became very annoying. In fact, the situation is so bad that these days movie theaters actively remind spectators (or at least they did last time I went to the movies about two years ago) to switch their phones to silent mode to prevent these disturbances.

The next step brought along the buzzer mode, a type of ringing that is still able to draw the attention of the user (most of the times) without intruding in the environment (or with a very limited intrusion). In my case it has been probably more than five years since I last heard the ring tone of my phone, which is permanently set in buzzer mode. I still allow the clock alarms to ring aloud, because otherwise I would not wake up, but every other notification has either been silenced or set to vibration. And I like it very much so, because it allows me to move around all the spaces I regularly visit (or visited before the pandemic) without having to constantly revisit my phone settings.

This trend towards discreet/silent communication is intrinsically attached to concept of a cell phone and has evolved naturally from the way people has ended up using them. In fact, my kids these days use their phones much less to talk than to exchange messages. The visionary invention of the SMS and all its derived instant messaging applications (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) frees the recipient from the need to pay attention to the message at the very moment it is coming. Besides, even if you are not necessarily in a hurry to respond to the messages, it is always relatively easy to sneak a peek onto your cell phone and check what they are about and then decide if they deserve an immediate response or not.

Today over lunch we had this interesting conversation where Jason was ranting against one of his friends who has the custom of sending voice messages over WhatsApp, which can be inconvenient in many ways. First of all, a voice message forces you either to give up on privacy (listening it aloud) or to go get your headphones (if you want to listen to the message privately). The second problem is that voice messages tend to follow the stream of consciousness of the speaker rather than a well structured message, so it very quickly becomes unnecessarily long. This long duration compound into the third problem, that the whole transmission cycle takes at least twice the duration of the message: first the emitter has to record the voice memo (potentially a few minutes), then it is transmitted (possibly instantaneously to the recipient) and finally the recipient has to play it back (again several minutes).

I understand that, if you are home alone with a baby and you receive a text message, recording a voice message with one hand while you hold the kid with the other might be your only option to respond promptly, but in most other cases a text (for concise responses) or a request for a full-fledged call (for extended conversations) is the adequate response. Because voice messages can only reach your brain through your ears, and there are many situations today where every sound is just too loud. Have a nice week.