  Drawing inspiration from the notion of cognitive incongruence associated with
Stroop's famous experiment, from musical principles, and from the observation
that music consumption on an individual basis is becoming increasingly
ubiquitous, we present the SoundSignaling system -- a software platform
designed to make real-time, stylistically relevant modifications to a personal
corpus of music as a means of conveying information or notifications. In this
work, we discuss in detail the system's technical implementation and its
motivation from a musical perspective, and validate these design choices
through a crowd-sourced signal identification experiment consisting of 200
independent tasks performed by 50 online participants. We then qualitatively
discuss the potential implications of such a system from the standpoint of
switch cost, cognitive load, and listening behavior by considering the
anecdotal outcomes of a small-scale, in-the-wild experiment consisting of over
180 hours of usage from 6 participants. Through this work, we suggest a
re-evaluation of the age-old paradigm of binary audio notifications in favor of
a system designed to operate upon the relatively unexplored medium of a user's
musical preferences.
