Sound science

The goal of this chapter is to define the state of the art of research in sound design and auditory display. The aim is to provide a wide overview of the extremely different fields, where these relatively new disciplines find application. These fields range from warning design and computer auditory display to architecture and media.

Proceedings of the SMC, 2009

ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP), 2005

Archives of Acoustics, 2015

This paper presents a relationship between Auditory Display (AD) and the domains of music and acoustics. First, some basic notions of the Auditory Display area are shortly outlined. Then, the research trends and system solutions within the fields of music technology, music information retrieval and music recommendation and acoustics that are within the scope of AD are discussed. Finally, an example of AD solution based on gaze tracking that may facilitate music annotation process is shown. The paper concludes with a few remarks about directions for further research in the domains discussed.

2015

A persistent concern in the field of auditory display design has been how to effectively use environmental sounds, which are naturally occurring familiar non-speech, non-musical sounds. Environmental sounds represent physical events in the everyday world, and thus they have a semantic content that enables learning and recognition. However, unless used appropriately, their functions in auditory displays may cause problems. One of the main considerations in using environmental sounds as auditory icons is how to ensure the identifiability of the sound sources. The identifiability of an auditory icon depends on both the intrinsic acoustic properties of the sound it represents, and on the semantic fit of the sound to its context, i.e., whether the context is one in which the sound naturally occurs or would be unlikely to occur. Relatively recent research has yielded some insights into both of these factors. A second major consideration is how to use the source properties to represent eve...

ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 2005

2009

A persistent concern in the field of auditory display design has been how to effectively use environmental sounds, which are naturally occurring familiar non-speech, non-musical sounds. Environmental sounds represent physical events in the everyday world, and thus they have a semantic content that enables learning and recognition. However, unless used appropriately, their functions in auditory displays may cause problems. One of the main considerations in using environmental sounds as auditory icons is how to ensure the identifiability of the sound sources. The identifiability of an auditory icon depends on both the intrinsic acoustic properties of the sound it represents, and on the semantic fit of the sound to its context, i.e., whether the context is one in which the sound naturally occurs or would be unlikely to occur. Relatively recent research has yielded some insights into both of these factors. A second major consideration is how to use the source properties to represent events in the auditory display. This entails parameterizing the environmental sounds so the acoustics will both relate to source properties familiar to the user and convey meaningful new information to the user. Finally, particular considerations come into play when designing auditory displays for special populations, such as hearing impaired listeners who may not have access to all the acoustic information available to a normal hearing listener, or to elderly or other individuals whose cognitive resources may be diminished. Some guidelines for designing displays for these populations will be outlined.

2006

This paper presents an overview of the concurrent presentation of sound as part of an auditory display. The reasons why designers would wish to use concurrent sound presentation (such as increasing communication bandwidth and allowing comparisons between data to be more easily made) are discussed and examples given. The paper then discusses the problems that can occur when sounds are concurrently presented before summarising and critically evaluating work by the authors on the identification of concurrently presented earcons.

2015

The workshop on Recycling Auditory Displays at ICAD 2008 aimed to capture knowledge about the design of auditory displays from the participants in a manner that would be easy to understand and reuse. The participants introduced themselves by providing examples of a good and a bad sound design. These examples raised issues of culture, identity, aesthetics and context that are more usually associated with product sound design than auditory display. Based on these discussions the themes Users, Applications, Techniques, and Environments were chosen to focus the further development of ideas. A mindmapping session was used to collect over 150 entries under these themes, and more than 30 references. An additional Others theme was needed for ideas that did not fit neatly into the existing categories. The information that has been collected shows that most research in auditory display falls under the themes of Applications and Techniques. The information under the themes of Users and Others ...

2016

This paper presents a brief description of surface electromyography (sEMG), what it can be used for, as well as some of the problems associated with visual displays of sEMG data. Sonifications of sEMG data have shown potential for certain applications in data monitoring and movement training, however there are still challenges related to the design of these sonifications that need to be addressed. Our previous research has shown that different sonification designs resulted in better listener performance for different sEMG evaluation tasks (e.g. identifying muscle activation time vs. muscle exertion level). Based on this finding, we speculated that sonifications may benefit from being designed to be task-specific, and that integrating a task analysis into the sonification design process may help sonification designers identify intuitive and meaningful sonification designs. This paper presents a brief introduction to what a task analysis is, provides an example of how a task analysis ...