An investigation of using music to provide navigation cues.

This paper describes an experiment that investigates new principles for representing hierarchical menus suchas telephone-based interface menus, with non-speech audio. A hierarchy of 25 nodes with a sound for eachnode was used. The sounds were designed to test the efficiency of using specific features of a musicallanguage to provide navigation cues. Participants (half musicians and half non-musicians) were asked toidentify the position of the sounds in the hierarchy. The overall recall rate of 86% suggests that syntacticfeatures of a musical language of representation can be used as meaningful navigation cues. More generally,these results show that the specific meaning of musical motives can be used to provide ways to navigate in ahierarchical structure such as telephone-based interfaces menu