SUWON, Jan. 12 (Korea Bizwire) — Gyeonggi Province’s fire department said Wednesday it had created a new firefighting dispatch ringtone based on the judgment that existing ringtones designed to inform firefighters about the occurrence of emergency situations were a source of stress.
When reports are received by the emergency control center, they are classified into four categories — fire, rescue, first aid and life safety — with the ringtones generating four different kinds of sounds, including a wakeup bell, boat horn and doorbell.
However, many firefighters made an appeal for stress and trauma caused by the abrupt blaring of high-pitched sounds.
Against this backdrop, last September the Gyeonggi-do Fire Services asked Kim Gun, an applied music professor at Dong-ah Institute of Media and Arts, to create a new ringtone that can address the problems of existing ringtones.
Park Jae-bum, a professor of occupational and environment medicine at Ajou University and Park Hye-yeon, a professor of clinical psychology at Dongduk Women’s University, participated in the production process.
The new ringtones are composed of uplifting orchestral sounds for fire, bright harmony sounds for rescue and a flute melody for life safety.
M. H. Lee (mhlee@koreabizwire.com)