Dataset Information

Alarm tones, music and their elements: Analysis of reported waking sounds to counteract sleep inertia.

ABSTRACT: Sleep inertia is a potentially dangerous reduction in human alertness and occurs 0-4 hours after waking. The type of sound people set as their alarm for waking has been shown to reduce the effects of sleep inertia, however, the elemental musical factors that underpin these waking sounds and their relationships remain unclear. The goal of this research is to understand how a particular sound or music chosen to assist waking may counteract sleep inertia, and more specifically, what elements of these sounds may contribute to its reduction. Through an anonymous, self-report online questionnaire, fifty participants (N = 50) reported attributes of their preferred waking sound, their feeling towards the waking sound, and perceived sleep inertia after waking. This data enabled the analysis and comparison between these responses to identify statistically significant relationships. Our results did not return any significant association between sleep inertia and the reported waking sound type, nor the subject's feeling towards their sound. However, the analysis did reveal that a sound which is ranked as melodic by participants shows a significant relationship to reports of reductions in perceived sleep inertia, and in contrast, sound rated as neutral (neither unmelodic nor melodic) returns a significant relationship to the reports of increases in perceived sleep inertia. Additionally, our secondary analysis revealed that a sound rated as melodic is considered to be more rhythmic than a melodically neutral interpretation. Together these findings raise questions regarding the impact melody and rhythm may hold with respect to sleep inertia intensity. Considering that the implementation of auditory assisted awakening is a common occurrence, the musical elements of a chosen waking sound may be an area to further interrogate with respect to counteracting sleep inertia.

SUBMITTER: McFarlane SJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6986749 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Alarm tones, music and their elements: Analysis of reported waking sounds to counteract sleep inertia.

McFarlane Stuart J SJ Garcia Jair E JE Verhagen Darrin S DS Dyer Adrian G AG

PloS one 20200128 1

Sleep inertia is a potentially dangerous reduction in human alertness and occurs 0-4 hours after waking. The type of sound people set as their alarm for waking has been shown to reduce the effects of sleep inertia, however, the elemental musical factors that underpin these waking sounds and their relationships remain unclear. The goal of this research is to understand how a particular sound or music chosen to assist waking may counteract sleep inertia, and more specifically, what elements of the ...[more]

PMID: 31990906

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Project description:Communicating an auditory experience with words is a difficult task and, in consequence, people often rely on imitative non-verbal vocalizations and gestures. This work explored the combination of such vocalizations and gestures to communicate auditory sensations and representations elicited by non-vocal everyday sounds. Whereas our previous studies have analyzed vocal imitations, the present research focused on gestural depictions of sounds. To this end, two studies investigated the combination of gestures and non-verbal vocalizations. A first, observational study examined a set of vocal and gestural imitations of recordings of sounds representative of a typical everyday environment (ecological sounds) with manual annotations. A second, experimental study used non-ecological sounds whose parameters had been specifically designed to elicit the behaviors highlighted in the observational study, and used quantitative measures and inferential statistics. The results showed that these depicting gestures are based on systematic analogies between a referent sound, as interpreted by a receiver, and the visual aspects of the gestures: auditory-visual metaphors. The results also suggested a different role for vocalizations and gestures. Whereas the vocalizations reproduce all features of the referent sounds as faithfully as vocally possible, the gestures focus on one salient feature with metaphors based on auditory-visual correspondences. Both studies highlighted two metaphors consistently shared across participants: the spatial metaphor of pitch (mapping different pitches to different positions on the vertical dimension), and the rustling metaphor of random fluctuations (rapidly shaking of hands and fingers). We interpret these metaphors as the result of two kinds of representations elicited by sounds: auditory sensations (pitch and loudness) mapped to spatial position, and causal representations of the sound sources (e.g. rain drops, rustling leaves) pantomimed and embodied by the participants' gestures.

Dataset Information

Alarm tones, music and their elements: Analysis of reported waking sounds to counteract sleep inertia.

Publications

Alarm tones, music and their elements: Analysis of reported waking sounds to counteract sleep inertia.

Similar Datasets

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