The great alarm experiment

Many people use a clock-radio to wake them up, either by waking up to the radio or to a horrible buzzing or beeping sound. For me, the radio is either too melodic and I wind up having a song stuck in my head, or there's some breakfast show with far too much banter. On the other hand, your traditional ringing, beeping, buzzing, irritating alarms make me wake up in a grumpy mood, and quite often drive me to turning the alarm off, rolling over, and going back to sleep.

The ideal alarm for me is one that isn't overly irritating, but gentle. It needs to be progressive and musical but not too melodic. Anything that's too sudden will induce sleep inertia, and anything too soft will cause an infinite snooze loop.

My goal was to write five partially irritating and overly cheesy ditties, purely designed to try to wake me up in the morning, in order to try and determine the best way for me to wake up reliably. I set myself a time limit of ≈1½-hours to complete each song, which hopefully explains why they sound cheap and nasty. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do a proper mix-down on these things, with the “best” reference equipment being my horrible iPod earphones (which perform atrociously).

It would seem that I am apparently stupid enough to share these things here in public. Don't worry, I'm not quitting my day-job any time soon, and I know these suck.

♩ Experiment №1: Speedy Electro Thingy

It would appear that a brain zapping arpeggio is too much, early in the morning. This initial experiment was designed to test a few theories, such as how hard I could push things that early in the morning, how long the track could be, and how horrible it'll sound through the speaker of my phone.

It turns out that my alarm cuts out after one minute, automatically snoozing itself at that point. Because of this, all subsequent tracks were kept short and my apparent lack of interest shows beyond the one minute point.

Not all too so surprising was the discovery that the speaker has absolutely no bass reproduction, distorts at ⪆−3dB, and has an amazingly sharp response spike somewhere near ≈3.5kHz that, if exploited properly, could probably burst eardrums.

Just for fun, there's a simplistic “hidden” vocal track thrown in the background, pushed through a vocoder modulated with white-noise, in an almost subliminal way. Or is that subliminable?

Not only did I wake up, but I woke up suddenly and felt grumpy for the rest of the morning.

♪ Experiment №2: Cheap Trance

I haven't done some trance in a while (I've been working on a thrash metal thing lately), so it was somewhat surprising I continued with 140bpm. Cheesy as it comes, I wanted to see if some sort of progressive build-up was the way to go. The sweep in the middle was to give a better idea of how the frequency response was, muddled in noise.

I'd like to hear this properly mixed down, without the synth-strings, with a good sub-inducer, since there's some nasty bass in this thing below 60Hz.

This helped me get out of bed faster than my usual alarm, however after the second snooze I had already hit the stop button in disgust. The progressive nature helped, but it was still too much noise and activity for that time of the morning.

♫ Experiment №3: The Annoying Bell Song

Continuing the “progressive” idea, I decided to put together something a little quieter, slower, and yet still slightly annoying. I decided on a synth-bell sound since it would be much more resonant from the phone. The little winding bell melody builds itself up at a suitable pace. Just for fun there's a very deep bass line here, simply because I wanted to see how inaudible it would be on the phone.

This woke me up adequately, although when the alarm is left to do its thing it does tend to start boring holes in my skull.