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Topics: Apple, iPhone, Sleep, Life, Technology
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: Apple, iPhone, Sleep, Life, Technology
If you're anything like me, you'll feel a wave of panic wash over you when you hear the soul-destroying sound of Apple's infamous 'Radar' alarm tone.
It might not even be your own ringtone that puts the fear of God into you, as thousands of iPhone users across the globe will all fall victim to keeping Apple's default alarm sound (yes, I see you lady on the train who forgot to turn off one of her multiple alarms and let it ring out for the whole of the carriage to hear).
But why do we hate it so much? Well, there are a few reasons...
Also known as a conditioned response, this refers to a learned, automatic, and involuntary response elicited by a previously neutral stimulus through classical conditioning, explains Simply Psychology.
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In this case, the learned response is waking up when hearing the sounds of 'Radar' blasting out from you bedside table. Unless you're one of the very, very few people in the world that like being woken up, then this sound will bring on the negative feelings for you as you'll associate it with having your sleep disturbed.
I think we can all agree that the sound of 'Radar' is hardly the calming noise of washes crashing on the shore, but arguably this wouldn't wake us from our slumbers so we need something a bit more offensive to our ears to spark us to wake.
And 'Radar' is just that.
Tech expert and YouTuber Greg Wyatt Jr explained that the ringtone has a 'short, sharp rapidly occurring tonal sound and a short decay time which is at a frequency of 2-5KHz'.
Because of this, the sound is very sensitive to the human ear and can be categorized as 'shrill' that's also associated with things like the scratching of glass or nails on a chalkboard.
If you want a more pleasant alarm tone that will still do the trick, chief technical officer of Quiet Mark Toby Saville suggested people try Apple's 'Cosmic' tone which has 'more mid-frequency (circa 1 kHz) content, is generally broadband in its frequency content (even frequency distribution) and has a soft, long decay time'.
Unless you work horrendous shifts at your job, you'll probably have your body clock pretty fine tuned by now and more or less wake up and go to sleep around the same time each day and night.
For me, if I know I have to be up for 7am I will usually star stirring in bed an hour beforehand as my body knows I need to be up soon. Since I'm half awake when my alarm goes off, it's not quite as insulting - however, if your body clock is totally out sync with your routine that day, 7am might feel like 3am when you get up.
To fix this, try set up a sleep schedule so that your body becomes accustomed to getting up around the same time every day. That way you won't rely of the deafening tones of 'Radar' each morning to get you out of bed.