Spatial audio in small display screen devices

Our work addresses the problem of (visual) clutter in mobile device interfaces. The solution we propose involves the translation of technique-from the graphical to the audio domain-for expliting space in information representation. This article presents an illustrative example in the form of a spatialisedaudio progress bar. In usability tests, participants performed background monitoring tasks significantly more accurately using this spatialised audio (a compared with a conventional visual) progress bar. Moreover, their performance in a simultaneously running, visually demanding foreground task was significantly improved in the eye-free monitoring condition. These results have important implications for the design of multi-tasking interfaces for mobile devices

Effects of feedback, mobility and index of difficulty on deictic spatial audio target acquisition in the horizontal plane

We present the results of an empirical study investigating the effect of feedback, mobility and index of difficulty on a deictic spatial audio target acquisition task in the horizontal plane in front of a user. With audio feedback, spatial audio display elements are found to enable usable deictic interac-tion that can be described using Fitts law. Feedback does not affect perceived workload or preferred walking speed compared to interaction without feedback. Mobility is found to degrade interaction speed and accuracy by 20%. Participants were able to perform deictic spatial audio target acquisition when mobile while walking at 73% of their pre-ferred walking speed. The proposed feedback design is ex-amined in detail and the effects of variable target widths are quantified. Deictic interaction with a spatial audio display is found to be a feasible solution for future interface designs

Design of dynamic soundscape : mapping time to space for audio browsing with simultaneous listening

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).by Minoru Kobayashi.M.S

Beat Browser

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53).Beat Browser is a music browsing environment that delivers immediate audio feedback while browsing arbitrarily large music collections. The goal of Beat Browser is to give users a sense of exploring "live" and continuous audio while rapidly moving between sources by mouse. It appears their entire universe of music is playing all the time, whether they're there listening or not. Beat Browser's Universal Time Base architecture keeps a central clock running that manages the playback position of every piece of music launclied, orchestrating this perceptual illusion.by Jefferey D. Goldenson.S.M

Spatial auditory display for acoustics and music collections

PhDThis thesis explores how audio can be better incorporated into how people access information and does so by developing approaches for creating three-dimensional audio environments with low processing demands. This is done by investigating three research questions. Mobile applications have processor and memory requirements that restrict the number of concurrent static or moving sound sources that can be rendered with binaural audio. Is there a more e cient approach that is as perceptually accurate as the traditional method? This thesis concludes that virtual Ambisonics is an ef cient and accurate means to render a binaural auditory display consisting of noise signals placed on the horizontal plane without head tracking. Virtual Ambisonics is then more e cient than convolution of HRTFs if more than two sound sources are concurrently rendered or if movement of the sources or head tracking is implemented. Complex acoustics models require signi cant amounts of memory and processing. If the memory and processor loads for a model are too large for a particular device, that model cannot be interactive in real-time. What steps can be taken to allow a complex room model to be interactive by using less memory and decreasing the computational load? This thesis presents a new reverberation model based on hybrid reverberation which uses a collection of B-format IRs. A new metric for determining the mixing time of a room is developed and interpolation between early re ections is investigated. Though hybrid reverberation typically uses a recursive lter such as a FDN for the late reverberation, an average late reverberation tail is instead synthesised for convolution reverberation. Commercial interfaces for music search and discovery use little aural information even though the information being sought is audio. How can audio be used in interfaces for music search and discovery? This thesis looks at 20 interfaces and determines that several themes emerge from past interfaces. These include using a two or three-dimensional space to explore a music collection, allowing concurrent playback of multiple sources, and tools such as auras to control how much information is presented. A new interface, the amblr, is developed because virtual two-dimensional spaces populated by music have been a common approach, but not yet a perfected one. The amblr is also interpreted as an art installation which was visited by approximately 1000 people over 5 days. The installation maps the virtual space created by the amblr to a physical space

Understanding and improving the identification of concurrently presented earcons

The use of sound to communicate information as part of a user interface has been an active research area for several years. Research has shown that sound can be concurrently presented to users to increase the bandwidth and rate of data presentation. However, when sounds are concurrently presented, they may interfere with each other, such that determining the data encoded in the sound becomes difficult. Modifications to the sounds can help to avoid such interference, but due to the nature of the sounds the impact of the modifications may be constrained. This thesis investigates such interaction with concurrently presented earcons. One experiment investigates how the identification of earcons is affected by the number concurrently presented. It was found that increasing the number of earcons concurrently presented lead to a significant decrease in the proportion of earcons and their attributes successfully identified by participants. With identification falling from 70% correct for one presented earcon to 30% for four concurrently presented earcons. A second experiment identified how modifications to the design and presentation of concurrently presented earcons affected their identification. It was found that presenting each earcon with a unique timbre as well as introducing an onsettoonset delay of at least 300ms caused a significant improvement in earcon identification, and the timbre encoded attribute of earcons. However overall identification levels remained low at around 30%. Two further experiments investigated the impact of spatialisation on concurrent earcon identification. They showed that spatial presentation of earcons which did not incorporate the findings of the previous experiment significantly improved identification of earcons and the register encoded earcon attribute, over earcons that were not spatially presented but did incorporate the findings of the previous experiment. Another experiment showed that spatial presentation of earcons which incorporated the unique timbre and 300ms onsettoonset modifications significantly improved the identification of the timbre encoded earcon attribute, although overall identification remained low. These four experiments yielded a set of guidelines for concurrent earcon presentation. Due to the nature of those experiments however, a further experiment was conducted to determine the impact of the guidelines on more ecologically valid tasks. A set of modified and unmodified earcons which represented entries in a mobile diary system were compared. Overall task accuracy remained low, although participants rated the modified earcons to require significantly less subjective workload