Overview of auditory representations in human-machine interfaces

Reviewer: Susan Loretta Fowler

The title of this paper is accurate: It is an overview of the various categories of sounds developers have created to provide information and entertainment to software users. The authors list the various types of sounds that are currently used in software for alerts and navigation, and in virtual reality environments. There are ten types of sounds, ranging from more or less natural to electronically modified or enhanced. Auditory icons are short sounds with meaningful connections to the physical events they represent, such as the sound of a dot matrix printer to indicate printing. Earcons are abstract, message-like sounds, the meanings of which users must learn, such as error-message beeps. Spearcons, or speech earcons, include bits of speech that are sped up so much that they are no longer recognizable as words but still retain their original pitches. Researchers find that spearcons are especially helpful in audio navigation of menu structures. Spindices are speech indexes, a version of the spearcon that uses sped-up initial sounds to indicate the starting letter of a menu item (similar to underlined keystroke accelerators on menus) or alphabetical lists. Auditory emoticons are audible "smileys," based on laughter, chuckling, crying, or other expressions of emotion. Spemoticons, like spearcons, use text-to-speech instead of natural speech, but in this case, they represent emotional or intentional states, just as emoticons do. Musicons are extremely brief samples of well-known music, used as audible reminders. Morphocons, or morphological earcons, include earcons and earcon families that can be customized to suit the individual taste of the user. Alerts and warnings are signals that are mapped onto sounds to convey varying levels of urgency. Sonifications are used for navigation. They include sounds such as navigation beacons (earcon-like sounds), object sounds (auditory icons associated with particular objects), and location information and announcements created as brief prerecorded speech samples. In section 4.1, the authors compare design approaches in various environments. Audio in traditional graphical user interface (GUI) environments is familiar to us all. Somewhat newer is audio used to help blind or partially sighted individuals parse 2D and 3D environments using spatially distributed sound, or 3D sound interfaces used in games and virtual environments. Sonifications are important in assistive technologies-for example, as feedback in telemanipulation and telepresence situations, to help rehabilitation patients learn correct limb and joint movements, and to help train athletes to achieve better posture and movements. The authors also categorize sonifications as conceptual and interactive. They define "conceptual" as providing an answer to a question-for example, "did I enter the right information__?__"-and they define "interactive" as representing a pattern of "awareness, interaction, multimodal rechecking, and confirmation." Using sounds to navigate a space would be a good example of interactive use. All in all, the paper is a good summary of sonification in 2013, although the authors don't spend much time on virtual environments, despite mentioning virtual audio displays (VADs) and soundscapes at the beginning of the paper. Unfortunately, the authors provide no links to sample sounds in the paper or in the references. There is supposed to be an appendix on "supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files," but the file is an empty PDF. It is very difficult to imagine all of these sounds in context. It's like reading a cookbook for a cuisine you've never tasted. Online Computing Reviews Service