[BC] processor insanity

[Mark Humphrey]

When I first visited Seattle in 1992, I noticed NOAA Weather Radio
would run a short "warble tone" just ahead of the local forecast.
Since this is the content most people listen for, the warble helped it
to stand out from the clutter of tidal information, degree-day
statistics, etc.  -- and more important, it had a much different sound
than the long 1050 Hz alert tone.

I thought it was a nice feature and since then, have wished all NOAA
stations would adopt this practice.  I guess there's a little bit of
Pavlov's Dog in all of us.

Mark

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 7:35 AM, Grady Moates <lists at loudandclean.com> wrote:

>    Actually, from my background in the '60's and '70's as a
> programmer in Top-40, this makes perfect sense.  I remember
> that we wanted to make the listener a bit automatic in their
> listening habits, so we'd have a time tone, a temperature/weather
> sound, and a headline news sound.  The key to this was to actually
> play the sound a few seconds BEFORE the time, temp or headlines,
> to give the listener a few seconds to disengage their minds from
> whatever they were daydreaming about, or pause a conversatin they
> might be having, so that they could momentarily shift their primary
> focus to the radio and get the "critical info".  By playing a very
> short station indentifier right between the sounder and the critical
> info, we could then establish a "comfort level" in some listeners,
> because they would not miss their critical info when listening to
> our station, but when listening to other stations they would always
> realize that the weather forecast was half-done before they'd
> surfaced enough to hear it, thereby missing the info they desired.