As all clinicians and caregivers know, a patient hooked up to a few machines can trigger dozens of alarms daily. These sounds, layered with coughing, vomiting, loudspeakers, telephones, elevators, and more, can turn hospitals into a sonic torture chamber.

The frequency of alarms in hospitals can make them hard to distinguish from one another, leading to a common condition called alarm fatigue. It occurs when clinicians hear alarms so often that they become desensitized and don’t respond. According to a 2012 study in Biomedical Instrumentation Technology, 556 patients in the US died between 2005 and 2008 because someone mismanaged a device alarm.

These worrisome facts are driving the movement to create more appealing hospital sounds, though it’s an uphill battle to convince the old healthcare guards that alarms don’t need to be so grating, The New York Times reports. A team of specialists, led by Dr. Judy Edworthy, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Plymouth in Britain, is working to incorporate the needs of patients and clinicians into a new set of medical device sounds reminiscent of soft techno music. The team hopes to revise the international medical device sound standards early next year. The current standard stipulates tones for six critical functions: cardiovascular, drug administration, ventilation, oxygen, temperature, and artificial perfusion. For each, the group has created “auditory icons,” as The Times called it, or sounds that mimic the actions they represent. (Think “thump-thump” for a heartbeat and rattling pills for drug infusion.) The outlet reports that researchers are testing how effective each sound is — determined by how quickly clinicians can learn to recognize and respond to the sounds. Dr. Edworthy said she believes the sounds will become standard practice in years to come.

An iteration of the icons approach is CareTunes, created by Dr. Elif Ozcan, who runs the Netherlands’ Critical Alarms Lab. CareTunes translates bodily functions into different instruments — drums for the heartbeat, guitar for oxygen saturation, and piano for blood pressure. When the patient is stable, the song is harmonious, but when the condition worsens, it sounds out of tune to grab a clinician’s attention. The melody wouldn’t replace a code blue, but this strategy would ideally be more effective at notifying caregivers early on when a patient’s going downhill. The hope is that creating a more pleasurable sound experience will benefit patients, especially those in the ICU who may experience delirium, and help healthcare professionals who battle burnout daily.