ADHD Alarm Sounds – Take Out The Trash (With AI-Generated Cover Art!)
As someone with ADHD, I’m always on the hunt for ways to keep important items at the top of my mind.
That’s why I like to record my own alarm sounds for the recurring things I need to do.
It’s a unique way to make the moment of recall more entertaining than a typical alarm sound, which I’ve found has a compounding effect on my ability to remember things.
In this case, I’ve been using this alarm sound for a number of years now.
It’s called: Take Out The Trash
You can visit my Distrokid page here to pre-save it, or access it once it’s live across platforms.
If you download it as an MP3, or download it via Apple Music, I think you should be able to set it as an alarm sound on your own phone!
I use this track as the alarm sound for my weekly Trash alarm, and every time it goes off I know what I need to do.
Hope you enjoy using this one as a memorable way to stay on the right track :)
Making My Cover Art with AI-Generated Art
For this track, I headed over to DALL-E and Midjourney to roll some prompts and see what I could get out.
I was looking to get something out in the style of a manga cover with “TRASH” as the title of the manga.
I tried a number of different manga titles to feed the prompt, including Naruto, One Piece, and Full Metal Alchemist, as well as a couple prompts about Corgis taking out their trash.
You’ll see below that I ended up pulling 5 images total, all from DALL-E.
Midjourney produced cool designs, however they were stylistically too divergent for me to easily compile them into a single image without a ton of toning/tuning, brushwork, and masking.
In the end I got a pretty funny but also somewhat impressive set of images out of the process, and then I composited them together in Photoshop with a little bit of photo-editing wizardry.
All told, this process took less than 40 minutes to execute and cost me essentially zero dollars.
I didn’t need to hire a manga illustrator.
I didn’t need to go hunting for fonts that I thought were cool.
I didn’t need to visit Envato Elements to see what kind of .png graphic files I could pull into a design.
I just… typed in words and got images.
The result is some decidedly quirky cover art that I feel is eye-catching in the exact way I want it to be for the target listener: ADHD people :)
I will note that most of the artwork generated by both AI tools was generally unusable.
In many cases it was too fuzzy or blurry once it was upscaled, or it was simply too chaotic.
The biggest issue I found with the AI is that it struggles to render text in the output.
Telling it that “TRASH” was the title of my manga required rolling a number of prompts repeatedly until the AI finally spit out a version of the design that didn’t say TRRAHSS, RASASHTTSAH, STRASTSHHA, etc.
Overall, DALL-E ended up being much more effective at outputting useful art for this project.
I will absolutely continue to use these tools going forward as they’ve done nothing but inspire me and empower me so far.
And ideally, the fact that this part is now so easy will make it easier to publish new music as well. :)
Stay tuned for more.
