“I think he has done a very good job, it’s not like music or voice, it’s a specific pattern of sounds,” he says. Getting the balance right – appealing to the emotion-processing parts of the brain without inducing fear or shock – was tough.Īrnal is impressed with Harper’s application of his research.
Siren sounds software#
To get the sound to work for the mobile clinics in Malawi, Harper spent months experimenting with audio software called Kyma to try and come up with a noise that sounded man-made enough to distinguish it from human or animal voices in the bush, but which was also not overly harsh or distressing. It was Arnal’s innate and, of course, irrepressible response to hearing his own new-born baby’s cries that helped to provoke his investigations.Īrnal had previously suggested that this insight could be used to design better alarms and sirens that don’t just make us freeze when we hear them, but actually invoke a more constructive reaction. We’re stimulated to actually do something.
It means that screams don’t just get our attention, they immediately prompt us to react in some way. “What I found is that this roughness doesn’t go through the same neural pathways used by speech,” he says. Scans revealed that, when we hear the characteristically rough, distressing sound of a scream, the amygdala – which processes fear reactions – is activated in our brains. Arnal had investigated what neural connections are activated when humans hear a sound that is particularly difficult to ignore: screaming. He was inspired by the neuroscience research of Luc Arnal at the University of Geneva.
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