"I suspect that's why the flat tones sound fishy, it's that lack of change over time, both with the sustain period just sort of sitting there, and then with that offset, basically going from 60 mph to 0 without gradually slowing down," Schutz said. He compared a flat beep sound to a car driving 60 mph then suddenly hitting a wall, as opposed to gradually slowing to a stop.
"Flat tones are basically incompatible with the physical reality of the natural world," Schutz said. But the flat tone of a beep lacks that fadeaway, or any other small variations of a natural sound. The way a natural sound gradually fades is one factor that our brains use to figure out what made it. In that case, energy is transferred into the drum and then gradually fades away."The sound has to decay," Schutz said, "and our perceptual system as it's evolved, I think it has really latched on to that as a useful way of understanding the event." In the analog world, sound is created from a transfer of energy, often from one object striking another, such as a stick hitting a drum, Schutz explained. "There's just something fundamentally different about the way your brain is processing sounds with natural envelopes," said Michael Schutz, assistant professor of music at McMaster University in Ontario and a researcher at the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind. Having spent most of our time evolving prior to the invention of smoke detectors, elevators and the like, our brains can't quite grasp beep sounds, so they irritate us. Fenton said this is probably the main reason they've remained common in computer applications and other devices, even ones that contain higher-quality speakers capable of making more nuanced sounds. It would take a designer with a passion for audio to advocate for more money to be put toward sound design, he said. "So much of design is dictated on budget," said Patrick Fenton, who is a designer at the Swayspace design studio and a teacher of industrial design at Pratt Institute in New York. "For something commercial, it has to be cheap," White said, "so the cheaper it is, the worse the quality is going to be in terms of the sound." It is also inexpensive, because low-quality piezoelectric buzzers are cheap to manufacture. The method doesn't require any computation, and was easy to perform even before most electronic devices contained computer chips.
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