We’ve all heard how tone can mean everything.
You’re trying to communicate something important, to a friend or an acquaintance, but it keeps coming across the wrong way. Perhaps you didn’t sleep enough, or the lack of understanding is frustrating, and thus your tone is affected. You just can’t get your point across.
Maybe you’ve had a bad day at work, and then see someone at home, or talk to them on the phone. They ask you why you are angry with them, and you are shocked. You didn’t notice, but your emotions affected your tone, and made you seem angry.
Perhaps you are in trying to sell a car, or an insurance policy, or a home, or any number of goods or commodities, and a slight lack of confidence is noted in your tone, causing you to lose that sale.
It could be that you are attending an event, but have just received some bad news en route. You try to be as friendly as possible, but your tone falters because of the preoccupations on your mind, and makes you seem insincere.
A simple change of tone could have drastically altered the feelings, mood, and impressions involved in all of the above scenarios.
But what if the tone isn’t vocal? What if it’s something less organic, but still has a specific meaning. What if it’s an alert tone?
Most alert tones are generic, they are simple blips, beeps, and odd digitized brevities to make us aware of a text message. And typically, they mean the abrupt, mostly ignorable, chimes that they are.
Where these alert tones take on a new meaning is when a specific one is assigned to someone important. Let’s say, over the course of time, it’s someone that communicates with you via text fifty, a hundred, or even more times a day. You may get a similar amount of alerts from your default tone, but they don’t mean as much. That specific tone becomes the representation, digitally, of that person. Anytime the default alert/text tone goes off, it could be anyone. But when that specifically selected sound goes off, you know exactly who it is.
Let’s say this tone has been in place for years, and you’ve heard it hundreds, thousands, and maybe millions of times. How ingrained is that notification in you? How much does that signify, each time the alert goes off? How conditioned is the response to that unique tone?
What happens if the frequency of those alerts fades? What happens in that void between that conditioned response? Does the mind fill the ambient space with imagined sounds of that alert? Do we confuse movies noises with that tone? Do we unintentionally hear it when enjoying music? Do we continue to even hear it in silence? If these conditions end up true, what do we do to make it stop? What do we do to remove this conditioning?
The solution is simple. Just change the tone. Return it to the default. Then, upon getting a notification, there won’t be any interpretation, there won’t be any confusion, there won’t be any ambiguity, it will sound the same as it does for anyone else.
Humbly yours,
J
