Sonification and Music as Support to the Communication of Alcohol-Related Health Risks to Young People : Study design and results

Excessive consumption of alcohol has been recognised as a significant risk factor impacting the health of young people. Effective communication of such risk is considered to be one key step to improve behaviour. We evaluated an innovative multimedia intervention that utilised audio (sonification—using sound to display data—and music) and interactivity to support the visual communication of alcohol health risk data. A 3-arm pilot experiment was undertaken. The trial measures included health knowledge, alcohol risk perception and user experience of the intervention. Ninety-six subjects participated in the experiment. At 1 month follow-up, alcohol knowledge and alcohol risk perception improved significantly in the whole sample. However, there was no difference between the intervention groups that experienced (1) visual presentation with interactivity (VI-Exp group) and, (2) visual presentation with audio (sonification and music) and interactivity (VAI-Exp group), when compared to the control group which experienced a (3) visual only presentation (V-Cont group). Participants reported enjoying the presentations and found them educational. The majority of participants indicated that the audio, music and sonification helped to convey the information well, and, although a larger sample size is needed to fully establish the effectiveness of the different interventions, this study provides a useful model for future similar studies

Evaluating the use of sonification and music to support the communication of alcohol health risk to young people: Initial results

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.The interdisciplinary research project, Using Sonification to COmmunicate public health Risk data (SCORe), aims to experimentally test how sonification, interactivity in combination with music, could increase the communicative potential of a visual presentation directed to young people and focused on health risk data of alcohol consumption. Specifically, we are studying how this type of presentation can support engagement with health information, and the effective interpretation and recall of data. In order to explore the possible influence of sound in understanding important health risk messages, a 3-arm pilot randomised control (participant-blinded) trial was designed. We compared a visual presentation augmented by sonification, music and interaction with a simple visual presentation and a visual presentation augmented by simple user interaction. This paper describes the most complex of the three health presentations (the audio-visual and interactive presentation) and presents initial findings that relate to this presentation only