Lately, I’ve been struggling to determine if the alarm I hear is my alarm, or the alarm on TV. Or if a phone on TV uses the same ring tone, I can’t tell if my phone is ringing or if it is the TV. It’s gotten so bad, I refuse to watch TV without the remote control handy so I can press mute to determine where the sound is.
Is this a symptom of just better sound engineering these days, or is it possible that there is some underlying cause in my auditory processing?
No way to know for sure, could be some of both.
A simpler solution is to change your ringtone to something highly individual.
Well, our dogs certainly can’t tell if it’s the TV doorbell…
I did a thread on the Modern Family episode that had a smoke detector with a dying battery beeping. It drove my dog Blackjack crazy and others had the same experience with their own dogs. Several times I’ve had to rewind and check to see if some beeping was coming from the TV or somewhere in the house. And I’ve heard of TVs setting off Alexa and other such devices.
Some sounds are very hard to localise, they are in a frequency range where the sound bounces around quite effectively indoors, leading to a diffuse but penetrating sound. This is exactly the range you would choose for any sort of alert. So phones and alarms tend to choose them. And guess what? Exactly the same characteristics makes them hard to differentiate from those on TV.
IME most people can’t tell the difference between the reproduction of an alarm sound on TV versus the real thing based on audio quality alone. If there’s any difference.
The reason we generally know it’s not real is that it’s coming from the same location as the TV.
But let’s say there’s a very quiet movie on such that people in the room don’t even realize the sound on the TV is on. Then suddenly a phone rings or there’s an alarm. Most people in the room will spring up and look around for a couple of seconds at least.
(Also I’ve personally had the opposite thing happen: turned off the TV to then realize a sound which I thought was ambient noise in the movie was actually ambient noise in the real world).
I would support a law banning sirens from radio advertising…
There is in the UK:
Morse code is barred too.
Just wanted to say thank you to everyone for the information.
Who knew? There must be vanishingly few people left now who could even read it.
My poor mother tends to slam on the brakes in complete panic when she hears sirens on the radio. 
Regarding the TV, there is a reality TV show (don’t judge!) in which their office phone’s ringtone is virtually identical to my landline’s, to the extent that I catch myself glancing at my handset whenever the phone rings on TV. I’ve also heard a few TV doorbells similar to mine. And there are certain ambient high-pitched noises that can make me think a smoke alarm battery is dying somewhere in the house.
My dog was weird about fireworks…unlike thunder, fireworks were to be confronted and barked at very loudly. On July 4th, she would always go outside with us to bark her fuzzy little head off, then join us inside while we watched national fireworks on TV. She regarded TV fireworks with suspicion…she would stare in the direction of the set, look at one of us, bark once in a hesitant manner, then go back to staring at the TV.
Yep siren sounds on the radio kinda make me jump sometimes. I live very rural and have a quiet house most times. TV is on but muted alot of the time. When the sound is on the pets get all perked up. No one has ever knocked on my door so I am not sure what they would do if they heard that sound. Gotta go…
I have an experiment to run, be back soon.
The video game Grand Theft Auto Vice City had a character whose cell phone had literally the exact same ring tone as my own home phone, and literally every time the characters cell phone went off in-game I thought my own phone was going off.
The above comments seem to be limited to mechanically-produced sounds, which when emitted by a TV are still mechanically produced. Unlike, say human voices, which have a distinctive quality that can be distinguished if they are organic, from those converted to the vibration of inorganic speaker components.
We’ve never had a working doorbell for the entire lives of our two little Fuzzballs. Any doorbell sounds from the television or internet will definitely get them going. Please don’t “Knock on wood” around them either.