Speed Signals Sounds and Call-Outs

This week on the blog, we will discuss the speed timing tracks. We have identified some key differences and issues that we are attempting to resolve with clearer definitions than FISAC-IRSF and WJRF had respectively. And this week, we’d like to guide you through our suggestion for new time tracks, part by part.

Start

This is the part where the event is presented to the athletes and where the athletes prepare for the event.

The Technical Congress have identified one key problem with the FISAC-IRSF and WJRF time tracks where a simple merge cannot occur. FISAC-IRSF uses "skippers ready" and WJRF uses "jumpers ready" when preparing the athletes for the start. IJRU's standpoint is that "Skipping/Jumping" (Rope Skipping/Jump Rope") should always be used in an official context, but we all agree that "jumpers slash skippers ready" sounds flat out bad in a “ready, set, go” call-out. Because of this, the Technical Congress proposes the wording "Athletes ready" to provide a neutral solution.

Therefore, all speed time tracks should start as follows:

"<Event Name> <Event Time> <2.000 seconds silence> Judges Ready? <0.500 seconds silence> Athletes Reday? <0.500 seconds silence> Set <0.500 seconds silence> <0.350 seconds BEEP>"

Where “<Event Time>” is defined as "[<N> times] <Time> seconds" where [<N> times] is only required if the event is performed in a relay fashion. (For example: “four times thirty seconds” or “one hundred eighty seconds”) All time definitions in the event presentation come in seconds. We wanted to add the time definition of the event to the start of the timing track to make it easier to confirm that the correct timing track is being played.

We also identified a problem where athletes sometimes misinterpret switch signals in FISAC-IRSF as a stop signals, because they sound exactly alike. However, to make the switch and stop signals as audible as possible, and as easy as possible to distinguish from the time call-outs we want to use beeps instead of spoken signals. Therefore, we want to use different frequencies for the start/stop signal and the switch signal.

As a baseline we averaged the frequencies of the sound FISAC-IRSF uses (a square wave with a frequency of 694 Hz) with the sound WJRF uses (a square wave with a frequency of 463 Hz). We then ended up at a square wave of 578.5 Hz, which conveniently enough is really close to the tone D5 (578.3 Hz) in standard tuning (A = 440 Hz).

To separate the start/stop beeps from the switch beeps we simply moved one whole step down the chromatic scale to a C5 (525.3 Hz) for the switch beeps.

Both the FISAC-IRSF and WJRF beeps are approximately 350 ms long, and we don’t see any reason to change that.

If we evaluate where those frequencies land in a Fletcher-Munson Curve, which approximates the loudness a normal-hearing person can perceive different frequencies, we can draw the conclusion that the IJRU sound should be well within an easily audible range. Below we’ve marked (from left to right) the FISAC-IRSF beep sound, the IJRU beep sound and the WJRF beep sound.

“Approximate equal loudness curves derived from Fletcher and Munson (1933) plus modern sources for frequencies > 16kHz. The absolute threshold of hearing and threshold of pain curves are marked in red. Subsequent researchers refined these readings, culminating in the Phon scale and the ISO 226 standard equal loudness curves. Modern data indicates that the ear is significantly less sensitive to low frequencies than Fletcher and Munson's results.” Image and description from this fantastic article by Monty from xiph

Green vertical lines added compared to original image, used with permission (C) Copyright 2012 Red Hat Inc. and Xiph.Org

While looking at the image above it might seem like the “optimal” frequency would be around 3500 Hz (approx. a G#7) but that doesn’t sound as pleasing. 1000 Hz was, however, a promising candidate for a beep sound.

We also reviewed a bunch of videos from competitions and speed events and what sounds were heard during those. Interestingly, we could see that there’s relatively little sound around 400-600 Hz where we’ve suggested placing the beep sounds, which should once again make them as audible as possible. We also recognized that when the audience began cheering at the end of the events the frequencies around 1000 Hz got very crowded, and that could in turn make a 1000 Hz beep less audible. Therefore, we decided to keep the beeps with lower frequencies to make them a bit more audible.

Sound spectrogram of this speed event from the FISAC-IRSF Championships in Sweden 2016. X-axis is time, y-axis is frequency. more red means more sound in that frequency at that time, blue represents less.

We had discussions about replacing the spoken “judges ready? athletes ready? set.” part with a series of beep sounds, like in alpine skiing, however, we felt that a spoken time track does feel less robotic and thus a bit more welcoming.

We also discussed randomizing the time between the “set” and the start beep every time the event occurs, like in a track sprint event, for example. However, we’ve decided that we’re more interested in testing the athlete’s speed than testing the athlete’s reaction time, and we believe that randomizing the start time is not beneficial.

Time Call-outs

To distinguish time call outs from start, stop, and switch signals, we are proposing keeping those as spoken call-outs; and to avoid unnecessary wordiness we have omitted the word “seconds” in those call-outs.

We have tried to derive a formula for time call-outs, like we’ve done with the start of the time tracks. Best described with the following table.

We did this so that if events are added in the future, or if you run a local competition with different speed events, it should be easy to know exactly how the time track for that event should sound.

		Athlete compete time
		Less than or equal to 1 minute	More than 1 minute	Soft Limit
Event duration	Less than or equal to 1 minute	Every 10 seconds
	More than 1 minute	Every 15 seconds	Every 30 seconds and last 15 seconds
	No Limit			At soft limit

For triple unders and the call-outs would be “15”.

For all the IJRU team speed events the call-outs would be “15” and for Double Dutch Speed Sprint on “15, 30, 45”.

For Single Rope Speed Sprint the call-outs would be “10, 20”.

For Single Rope Speed Endurance the call-outs would be “30, 1 minute, 30, 2 minutes, 30, 45”.

In addition to these rules, we are proposing that any events this table doesn’t cover, that are shorter than or equal to a minute, should have call outs after half the event, rounded to the closest 5 seconds. If each athlete’s section is longer than a minute, call outs should be made every 30 seconds, and once halfway between the last “30” or “X minute(s)” call-out and the end beep, rounded to the closest 5’th second.

Examples

Note that these examples are NOT the final or official time tracks. Although, they are accurate in timing, some different accentuations might be made in the final versions, and a different voice might be used.

Community Commentary

We are still working through your feedback from last week, and will resume the community commentary feature next week.

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Until next week,
The IJRU Technical Congress

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