For many, the sub­ject of noti­fic­a­tion tones is little more than an idle bul­let point in the fea­ture list of their phone — can I cus­tom­ize them? Yes? Check. My phone is cool.

But it’s worth con­sid­er­ing these sounds more care­fully, because they are among the most evid­ent aspects of your phone inter­ac­tions. Not only are they sounds you’ll likely be hear­ing hun­dreds of times per week, but by exten­sion they’ll also be sounds that you’re shar­ing with your envir­on­ment. In many cases, I get the sense that phone users are con­tent to pol­lute the world with gar­ish noti­fic­a­tions because they use them more as an expres­sion of their per­son­al­ity than as actual alerts.

They dis­tance them­selves from the ori­ginal idea of noti­fic­a­tion tones and try to re-purpose them as the equi­val­ent of a per­sonal theme song gen­er­ator that peri­od­ic­ally reminds them (and every­one in the vicin­ity) of how cool they are. In other words, the sounds become more about noti­fy­ing oth­ers than noti­fy­ing them­selves.

As an audio geek, I have to remind myself not to judge a per­son by their ring­tones more often than you’d think. But this art­icle isn’t about elit­ism or audio etiquette, it’s about my quest to develop the ideal noti­fic­a­tion tones for my phone. Read more →