New app allows you to escape Zoom meetings by playing unbearable sounds

• The app, "Zoom Escaper," provides a library of annoying sounds as a "get-out-of-Zoom-free-card."
• The sounds range from bad connection tones to broken-up and incomprehensible words.
• The app's creator, Sam Lavigne, hopes that "people use it to escape Zoom calls and do less work."
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An app developer has come up with a nifty and somewhat devious solution to help people duck out of boring Zoom calls.

Zoom Escaper is a free web widget that allows users to add fake audio effects to a Zoom call, making it so annoying for the other participants that they might prompt users to leave the call, allowing for a quick escape.

The audio effects range from the scraping sound of a choppy connection to broken-up words and incomprehensible gibberish. Other noises available on the application to annoy one's co-workers and infuriate collaborators include a crying baby, a man weeping loudly, the incessant barking of a dog, and continuous construction.

According to an article by The Guardian, the widget was created by artist Sam Lavigne, who hoped that Zoom Escaper would allow people to "use it to escape Zoom calls and do less work."

"I've been thinking about how sabotage might work in a digital context, especially one where the means of production are also personal devices that mediate your social life," Lavigne added.

According to The Verge, Lavigne said that he has worked on other projects with the ethos of what he calls "deliberate slowdown, reducing productivity and output, self-sabotage, etc."

In 2017, he released "The Good Life," which let people sign up to clog their inboxes with some 225,000 emails confiscated from Enron during its 2001 scandal. In 2016, he released another project called "Slow Hot Computer" which was a website that made a computer - you guessed it - run slow and hot.

"Use it at work to decrease your productivity," Lavigne told The Verge.

Lavigne has released a video tutorial on YouTube, where you can learn how to set up Zoom Escaper and listen to samples of the available sound effects.