Accessible Spectrum Analyser

Presented at the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2016)This paper presents the Accessible Spectrum Analyser (ASA) developed as part of the DePic project (Design Patterns for Inclusive collaboration) at Queen Mary University of London. The ASA uses sonification to provide an accessible representation of frequency spectra to visually impaired audio engineers. The software is free and open source and is distributed as a VST plug-in under OSX and Windows. The aim of reporting this work at the ICAD 2016 conference is to solicit feedback about the design of the present tool and its more generalized counterpart, as well as to invite ideas for other possible applications where it is thought that auditory spectral analysis may be useful, for example in situations where line of sight is not always possible

SoundTrAD, a method and tool for prototyping auditory displays: Can we apply it to an autonomous driving scenario?

This paper presents SoundTrAD, a method and tool for designing auditory displays for the user interface. SoundTrAD brings together ideas from user interface design and soundtrack composition and supports novice auditory display designers in building an auditory user interface. The paper argues for the need for such a method before going on to describe the fundamental structure of the method and construction of the supporting tools. The second half of the paper applies SoundTrAD to an autonomous driving scenario and demonstrates its use in prototyping ADs for a wide range of scenarios

Sonification of the Riemann Zeta function.

The Riemann zeta function is one of the great wonders of mathematics, with a deep and still not fully solved connection to the prime numbers. It is defined via an infinite sum analogous to Fourier additive synthesis, and can be calculated in various ways. It was Riemann who extended the consideration of the series to complex number arguments, and the famous Riemann hypothesis states that the non-trivial zeroes of the function all occur on the critical line 0:5 + ti, and what is more, hold a deep correspondence with the prime numbers. For the purposes of sonification, the rich set of mathematical ideas to analyse the zeta function provide strong resources for sonic experimentation. The positions of the zeroes on the critical line can be directly sonified, as can values of the zeta function in the complex plane, approximations to the prime spectrum of prime powers and the Riemann spectrum of the zeroes rendered; more abstract ideas concerning the function also provide interesting scope