Ringtone and Notification sounds are jarring/stressful

[bagage]

Description

The default VoIP ringtones are too high and damn too stressful. Would be great to have something less violent/aggressive.

First some fade in would be great to smooth the transition from "no volume" to "full ringtone volume". But even apart of that, something less aggressive would be better IMO.

[MTRNord]

Maybe make it chooseable by the user

[bagage]

Can be. But first and most important is to change the default ringtone (that is, the one that 99% of users will use anyway).

[itay-grudev]

Here is a link to the newly proposed sound:

⏯️ Ringtone by Baptiste Gelez

⏯️ Current ringtone (for comparison)

[vertigo220]

#5891 is a duplicate of this one, with much more discussion. Anyone here that hasn't given a thumbs up to that issue should do so.

[t3chguy]

Duplicate of #5891

[robintown]

I'm reopening this; we should use this issue to track replacing the default ringtone with something better, and use #5891 to track custom ringtones (Though both are motivated by the current ringtone being jarring, they are distinct requests with differing priorities.)

[t3chguy]

@robintown the title of #5891 doesn't say anything about custom? The comments seem to be filled with specific ringtone suggestions so that really doesn't seem like the right way to triage these issues

[robintown]

When reading the title of #5891 along with the context of the first two comments, which specifically talk about users changing the ringtone, I think it's clear that a custom ringtone feature was the intent. There has been some discussion of better defaults on that issue as you've noted, because we have an XY problem on our hands (X being that the current sounds are painful, and Y being the proposal of a custom sounds feature). My separation of these issues is because we may still want to consider the latter after we've fixed the defaults.

[eslerm]

@t3chguy could the title of #5891 be changed to Customize ringing/notification sound or similar? Duplicate issues to #5891 which are specifically about customizing these sounds include: #6776 #17100 #18863 #23367 #23484 #20286 matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#10494

#20198 #15023 element-hq/element-android#6172 are specific to the current ringtone being jarring/stressful. (#15023 is a little of both)

[t3chguy]

@eslerm done

[rain-1]

please have a solution for this. I find the ringtone very harmful to my nervous system

[lectrode]

@robintown Regarding your comment from 2 months ago on matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#10494:

The first order of business will be to get our product team's input on whether this is in fact the kind of change that we want to make to our notification settings. In particular, I think our team has a project in progress to improve the notifications settings page that could conflict with this change.

Please kindly tell your product team that this is more than an accessibility issue - it is a health issue. Current and prospective users do not care if they have something "in the works" - they have had nearly 7 years to fix this critical issue and have yet to do so. In fact, it has only gotten more difficult to workaround the default ring sound in that time.

If they want to continue work on whatever it is they've been working on, they are welcome to do so once the application no longer causes heart attacks. Please either accept that pull request, or change the default ring and notification sounds to something substantially softer, or both.

I am aware that obesity has been a growing concern in some countries, but making people jump out of their seats whenever they get a call is not the answer.

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Edit: upon further inspection of that pull request, that seems to only allow changing the notification sound, not the ring. As such that by itself would unfortunately not be enough to resolve the health-impact of this.

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Edit2: I would like to thank the element dev team for the client as a whole. It really only is this one issue that makes it intolerable for myself and some of my friends and family. This morning I received an element call while presenting on a work call, and while it was my fault that I had left element open, there were quite a few remarks from coworkers on that call that indicated that the harsh ring from element caused them distress. As such I will no longer be using element while this is still an issue.

Thanks to this comment, I do not need to resort to ditching matrix entirely. Schildichat has adopted much less harsh ring and notification sounds by default. I'll be switching to that until further notice.

[piegamesde]

matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#11078 (comment) brought to my attention that this issue actually is only about the ringtone and not the notification sound. However, #20198 was closed as duplicate of this one, yet it is about the notification sound.

So, could we either expand the title of this issue to also include the notification sound, or alternatively re-open #20198 ?

[luixxiul]

please have a solution for this. I find the ringtone very harmful to my nervous system

fyi schildichat has implemented a less stressful notification sound which should not be harmful for your health. You might want to check it out.

[claell]

@vector-im/product (hope it works if I use that) - Following matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#4500 (comment), this is the relevant issue to get some input. Can this PR be reopened and merged, or is the team wanting to work on an own solution (with unknown ETA)?

[Bugsbane]

Take a listen to the ring tone I posted here (not my work but CC-BY licensed):
#5891 (comment)

I find this infinitely preferable over the current default.