Monday I finished a book — finished it modulo light polishing, finished what has to be the final structural draft — so I spent the balance of the week absent in spirit, if not consistently in body. I thought I would use my spiritual absence to catch up on reading, not least a stack of papers on senescence in non-avian reptiles. The weather was cold, the news dismal, and it was a relief to sit around drinking tea and nudging forward various Time Kitchen–related nonsense. Alas, I got less reading done than I’d hoped, for I got sucked into a search for a new interval timer.
A while back I gave a workshop for the design team at a maker of posh loudspeakers. I had them all make one-minute recordings on their phones and then we sat around their studio on a rainy afternoon at the start of autumn when they were fresh off a product launch and exhausted and listening to their recordings on an eighteen-driver sound bar, which— as a monaural hearer, my grasp of “soundstage”, as audiophiles use the term, is limited, but I had never encountered a PA with the detail in the imaging that this thing had. Of course we were limited by the source material, which, again, they’d recorded with their phones—but most if not all of them were using Apple phones, which come with pretty good ADCs and microphones onboard, so these recordings of the automated announcements on the municipal transit bus, a neighborhood street fair, the rain outside a kitchen window, and so on had an uncanny popout quality to them. That evening at dinner we got to talking about the implications of the kind of work they did for the design of products that deal but peripherally with sound—washers, for instance. If you’re investing in a high-end washer (because maybe you want to wash your c.2016 Evan Kinori lounge shirt at home), you’d like to think that whoever designed and manufactured the thing gave thought to how it sounds—not just the “audio display”, the signals to indicate that the selected cycle has begun or completed, that the door’s been left open, etc, but the way the drum sounds when it’s churning. This example carries special significance for me, for two years ago I went through a period of weeks when, for reasons still unclear, the systole in (I suspect) one of my carotid arteries was audible to me in the evenings and mornings—and the first time I heard it I assumed it was because my partner was running the washer in the next room.
And yet, sometimes we acquiesce in sounds whose principle design considerations seem to have been ease of manufacturing rather than sonic properties. Don’t get me wrong—ease of manufacturing is a serious design consideration, and it can lend itself to remarkably elegant solutions. In the auditory display category, perhaps the best example is the Casio F-91W—or any Casio wristwatch from before the advent of the kinds of driver miniaturization we take for granted today. The Casio F-91W has no driver per se. Rather, the piezoelectric crystal is soldered directly to the steel backplate, which is secured to the resin housing at the corners but not across the surface. The backplate is thin enough that under the acoustic stimulus of the piezo it resonates like the head of a drum, producing a characteristic chirping timbre. By varying the frequency of the piezo vibration, you can, in fact, generate a range of pitches from the F-91W, and if you start writing complications for the F-91W module upgrade SensorWatch you can play with this, as the SensorWatch API includes affordances for audio signals at a range of pitches (of course, if you’ve installed the replacement module, you’ll have to solder the backplate to the new onboard piezo if you want to get any sound out of the thing … I kind of like the idea of a watch that makes no sound and gives signals in the visual channel, and as the SensorWatch features not one but two LEDs, one red, one green, you can actually do quite a bit more in the luminous channel than with Casio’s stock Module 593). (Full disclosure: I wrote the first alarm complication for SensorWatch — it’s since been bumped from the repo by a better one.)
These days, between tinnitus (~10,000 Hz, varying in quality but consistent in fundamental frequency) in my hearing ear and a notch in my hearing at round 5,000 Hz, I can barely hear the F-91W, especially if I’ve managed to roll over onto my hearing ear in my sleep. Occasionally I’ll hear it if the backplate is set on a stiff surface, which serves as a further amplifier.
Thus, interval timers. For ten years I’ve been an adherent of the GymBoss. I’m on my second now, but I’ve ordered a third, with a shockproof, watertight housing, a backlight, and an even louder piezo. The GymBoss exists to squeal at you when the rest cycle of your interval routine is over and it’s time to move. Plus it has a stopwatch and a clock, and if they added an alarm clock to the one with an onboard battery and backlight, it’d be pretty much perfect as a bedside alarm. Would it be better suited to its task if the sound it made was filled out with lush harmonics, so that it sounded more like a wine bottle ensemble than a penknife being drawn across glass? To me this represents an empirical question. I’m not ready to say I’d prefer an interval timer that was pleasant to hear. Most days, it’s a relief just to know I can hear this one over traffic, and the piercing, spectrally focused quality of its sound lends itself to that.
Thus, another entry in the inventory of useless junk (aka STUFF): interval timer.