Layered software architecture for designing environmental sounds in non-visual interfaces

This paper presents work in progress on automatic generation of "environmental sounds" based on physical modelling. The increase in complexity of the Graphical User Interfaces , the expansion of Virtual Reality and multimedia applications has led to the necessity of using sound to ease the human computer interaction. This category of sounds can be used as non-speech audio presentation of objects and as interaction mechanisms to non-visual interfaces. They occur in everyone´s experience and exclude the necessity of previous special training. They are also very suggestive, permitting the meaningful mapping of events from the real world to computer-related activities and are not annoying for the user