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Auditory alarms are relied upon to provide cues for industries with high-risk, multisensory performance tasks such as health care. In an anechoic chamber, anesthesiology residents (N = 25) were tested in a simulated multi-task setting, including a patient monitoring primary task with alarmed events, and a visual vigilance task. Alarm type was varied between conventional (following the International Electrotechnical Commission Standard 60601-1-8) and a novel auditory icon alarm, which provide additional information about the event causing the alarm. Novel alarm usage led to a 37% increase in vigilance accuracy and 160 ms reduction in response time, implying that the use of auditory icon alarms can provide multisensory benefits. These findings suggest that novel auditory icons help individuals by reducing the cognitive burdens of primary tasks through reducing visual search of the patient monitoring display. Therefore, auditory alarms help to reduce visual demand through offering cues to change; attention can be focused through the recognition of specifically encoded characteristics of audiovisual objects. These findings advocate for reconsideration of alarm type usage in favor of novel alarms, especially in high-stakes environments to potentially improve patient safety and outcomes.

In high-risk industries, responding accurately and promptly to spoken commands is crucial to ensure safety and productivity. When simultaneous sounds occur, it increases the difficulty of responding efficiently and accurately. This study examined responses to spoken commands in an audio-visual multitasking paradigm that simulated a high-consequence working environment. Participants had varying levels of formal music training (FMT): no FMT, 1–3, 3–5, and 5+ years of FMT. We found that FMT groups were similar in accuracy overall and background music decreased accuracy for all groups. The degree of FMT significantly impacted non-response. Additionally, there was an interaction where the no FMT group responded 1.5-fold less frequently in the presence of background music; however, participants with 5+ years of FMT had no decrease. Considering the similar accuracy with less frequent responding, the 5+ years FMT group appears well calibrated to when they were unsure of the answer, suggestive of improved meta-cognition which could be valuable in high-risk industry settings. Future research can examine performance within different types or quality of musical training, and pedagogical approaches can be compared.

Music and alarms have both been shown to improve performance in surgeons in the operating room (OR), but may interfere with anesthesiologist communication and performance. This experiment investigated the effects of music and alarms on speech intelligibility in a cognitively demanding multitask setting using simulated clinical, speech intelligibility, and visual vigilance tasks. Anesthesiology residents’ (n = 25) speech intelligibility performance was measured using the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) in a 2 × 2 within-subjects design that varied background (simulated OR noise or OR noise with music, both normalized to 60 dB SPL) and alarm type (conventional or a novel auditory icon conforming to IEC 60601-1-8). Linear mixed-effects models showed music had a significant reduction in accuracy (p < 0.001), increased RT (p < 0.001), more instances of no response (p < 0.001). With music, average RT was increased by ∼0.2 s (95% CI: 0.07, 0.39), the odds of a correct response were reduced by ∼39% (95% CI: 25, 50), and the odds of no response were increased by 340% (95% CI: 246, 467). There was no evidence that alarm type impacted CRM performance. A device that modulates music volume during critical phases could reduce communication interference.