Notifications are an important aspect of our phones and social media, they allow us to stay connected with others, but they are also one of the most distracting features of our phones. A study from 2015 that looked at how phone notifications can affect our attention concluded that “mobile phones can disrupt attention performance even if one does not interact with the device” (The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification, 2015).
There are a variety of notification sounds and some applications come with their own, and others use the devices built in sounds. High pitched tones are proven to be more invasive and distracting and the notification sounds that these applications produce should be changed to lessen the negative effect that notifications can have on our concentration and mental health.
Click on the buttons to experiment with different notification sounds. The top three are sounds from 3 popular social media applications and the others are examples of replacement sounds.