Auditory alarms are an important component of human–computer interfaces, used in mission-critical industries such as aviation, nuclear power plants, and hospital settings. Unfortunately, problems with recognition, detection, and annoyance continue to hamper their effectiveness. Historically, they appear designed more in response to engineering constraints than principles of hearing science. Here we argue that auditory perception in general and music perception in particular hold valuable lessons for alarm designers. We also discuss ongoing research suggesting that the temporal complexity of musical tones offers promising insight into new ways of addressing widely recognized shortcomings of current alarms.

Auditory interfaces, such as auditory alarms, are useful tools for human computer interaction. Unfortunately, poor detectability and annoyance inhibit the efficacy of many interface sounds. Here, it is shown in two ways how moving beyond the traditional simplistic temporal structures of normative interface sounds can significantly improve auditory interface efficacy. First, participants rated tones with percussive amplitude envelopes as significantly less annoying than tones with flat amplitude envelopes. Crucially, this annoyance reduction did not come with a detection cost as percussive tones were detected more often than flat tones—particularly, at relatively low listening levels. Second, it was found that reductions in the duration of a tone's harmonics significantly lowered its annoyance without a commensurate reduction in detection. Together, these findings help inform our theoretical understanding of detection and annoyance of sound. In addition, they offer promising original design considerations for auditory interfaces.

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In this practitioner paper, we present a customizable multi-domain methodology for eliciting task criticality ratings to determine if a Critical Task Analysis (CTA) is required to analyze safety-critical tasks undertaken by personnel conducting uranium mining and processing. This evidence-based methodology builds upon previous methodologies by integrating empirical findings from the risk and job analysis literature. Tasks are rated against five critical criteria: Impact on Environmental/Social License, Mission Effectiveness, Impact on Human Health/Safety, Cost, and Impact on Equipment/Infrastructure. The relative importance of each criterion can be customized through pre-determined weightings. Based on the summation of ratings against each criterion, a task criticality rating is derived using a custom flowchart. This allows for wide applicability to projects and industries, whose weighting against each criterion will differ, and is a step towards creating a validated, standardized CTA methodology that can be applied by practitioners across a broad range of safety critical domains.