Stop the beeping beep: Do our appliances have to nag?

Sounds are subjective. What is literally music to my ears can be someone else’s headache. Especially when there is a generation gap... (Five Seconds of Rubbish is an expression used pointedly by someone in our house.) When, where and why we hear sounds also has an impact. Birds chirping can seem magical if you’re awake, on holiday and the sun is shining but diabolical if it’s 4am and your cat just brought one inside. There are also sounds which are ultimately just unpleasant noise – think circular saws, lawn mowers, or the sound of a jack hammer hitting concrete.

While many sounds, pleasant or otherwise, are naturally occurring we also live with an increasing amount of created noise: electronic beeps, pips and parps. In fact, most days it can seem that the sounds that surround us are artificial: the smoke alarm, dishwasher, microwave, washing machine and in our case a recently purchased heater.

There’s an awful lot of research behind the pitch, loudness and general well, sound, of that scientifically designed din. For example, the dog whistle, which lets loose a sound that we (fortunately) can’t hear, has been around for almost 140 years And there’s research into the history of how different pitches and different sounds have been used for different purposes. Just think of the smoke alarm. That sound is extremely loud but is also pitched so that it is hard to ignore. Similarly, the beeps the smoke alarm emits when the battery is getting low are relatively quiet, but still spectacularly annoying. It’s a noise that you can’t ignore, and in that case, for good reason. However, do all our appliances need to spur us into action? Are appliances trying to tell us something? Do they really need to imply that we should get our lazy selves up off the couch and do the next chore? No-one ever asked for honesty from their appliance...

Noisy appliances has been a hot topic for a few years now. And I’m not altogether sure if the call to tone down our sassy and bold appliances has been listened to, or if our penchant in our house for retro appliances means we live in some 1950s largely beep free Utopia. Most of our appliances beep to some extent, but the old fashioned knobs and dials make far more familiar ticking and tocking noises, so the beeping is largely kept to a minimum. Beeping is also usually reserved for a useful function, like the microwave or dishwasher quietly letting you know they’ve finished. However, the two really big exceptions to that rule are our washing machine and the new heater.

The pitch of the beep on the washing machine is really loud and has a seriously demanding quality. You can hear it from any room in the house and in fact you can still hear it while outside hanging out the washing. Two things annoy me about the beep – the pitch of the noise and the fact that it doesn’t stop when you open the door and take the clothes out. And that noise, right up close, is not pleasant. But, not to dismiss that annoyance, the heater is something else altogether. The purchase of our heater breaks with our retro tradition – it’s sleek and futuristic and beeps like a beeping spaceship, or someone’s idea of one. Not only does it beep loudly and earnestly when you switch it on (like you’re using a control panel in some major spacecraft and about to enter warp speed) it then makes some very strange whiney alarm noises. Not the best in the middle of the night. They appeared to be saying “I’ve woken you up to tell you I’m up to heat, so now you can relax and go back to sleep”. How thoughtful. The people who manufacture the heater also make house alarms, so maybe they are slightly addicted to the beeping.

So why do our appliances beep? One reasonable explanation is that the beeping is to let us know that something is happening. The beeps are aural cues to let us know we have indeed switched something on, individual buttons are working and that the relevant cycle has finished. I also read a fascinating theory about beeping that suggested the beeps were designed to mimic sounds represented in science fiction. I find this intriguing and I’m sure it partially explains the noises our modern and sleek heater makes. Unfortunately most of the article was written in German, so I’m largely none the wiser…

I’m the first to confess that this is undoubtedly a first world problem. However, with so many of us on quests to simplify, purify and de-stress our lives, we could possibly imagine ways to make our homes calmer, quieter and more comforting spaces. Noise pollution, and increasing intolerance to noise, is also a vexing increasing issue.

The main question that I’m going to throw out there to manufacturers, is do our appliances have to make any noise? And my suggestion, if they do, is that maybe we could choose the sound? Similar to how we can choose ringtones and other notifications, maybe we could choose from a selection of options or even download the precise calming notification we wanted: pipe music or the calming flute to say the washing machine had finished. Even better if we could record our own voices telling someone else it was their turn to unload the machine. I would always choose that notification, always.