Barrass 1 Some golden rules for designing auditory displays

Information sizzles and rustles, it can whooosh or splash, or rumble. You can hear information in the natural environment, but can you hear information in digital data? The soundtracks of computer games demonstrate that synthetic sounds can provide information that may be difficult to see, and that sounds may enhance enjoyment and performance in an activity. However game design is not driven by issues of faithful representation that are primary for the designer of an auditory display of data structure. The design of sounds to support information processing activities is a new challenge because of the types of information involved, and the need for a consistent understanding by a cross-section of people. This chapter introduces some principles for designing auditory information that address these challenges. These principles are demonstrated by individual examples, and then applied as a whole to the design of an auditory display that can allow a listener to quickly answer the question “is there gold in this pile of dirt?” Principles for information design Yes, people can hear information about data that is mapped into sounds. This conclusion is based on the results of a series of formal experiments carried out by Sarah Bly in the early 1980’s. In one of her experiments she asked participants to sort gold from dirt by listening to a six dimensional mapping of soil measurements into sounds. Most listeners were able to correctly identify more than half the samples. However the ability to hear this information depends critically upon how the data is mapped into sound. The lack of a systematic approach to designing the data-to-sound mapping was identified by Bly as a “gaping hole ” impeding progress in auditory display [Bly S. 1994]. Perhaps we can look to methods of graphic display that involve similar issues of representation to bridge this gap. Some principles of information design that have been consistently identified, and broadly applied, are summarised i