Alarm Soundboard

The Amber Alert tone is the most thoroughly designed sound here. United States rules specify the Emergency Alert System attention signal as two frequencies played together, 853 Hz and 960 Hz, held within half a hertz of those values. The two sit almost exactly a major second apart, close enough to grind rather than blend, so your ear registers roughness instead of a chord and familiarity never wears it smooth. Wireless Emergency Alerts, the system that carries it to phones, went live in April 2012.

Sirens solve a different problem. A modern emergency vehicle runs several preset tones off one speaker: wail for distance, yelp for junctions, hi-lo against stationary traffic, and the air horn for the one driver who still has not looked up. Sirens are also notoriously hard to place, because their traditional band of roughly 500 Hz to 1.8 kHz sits in an awkward gap between the two cues human hearing uses for direction. The generic wail on this board impersonates no real service, which makes it the safer pick for anything public.

The domestic end is somehow worse. A smoke detector's low-battery chirp is a tiny sound with an outsized capacity to ruin a night, the campus fire alarm is the institutional version, and Radar is the default iPhone alarm that a great many people now resent on reflex. Screens contribute the rest: the Among Us emergency meeting and sabotage buzzer from InnerSloth, a red-alert klaxon from edit culture, SpongeBob's fog horn, and the Squid Game wake-up call, which is Haydn's Trumpet Concerto in E flat major doing a job Haydn never planned for it.

One caution worth reading before you press anything. In the United States it is unlawful to transmit the EAS or WEA attention signals outside a real emergency or an authorised test, and that rule covers broadcasts, adverts and promos. Playing a clip to the person next to you is a different matter, though their reaction may be hard to distinguish. Everything downloads free as an MP3 from its own sound page.