Interactions - January/February 2009

events to produce entire auditory worlds. As more personal computers were produced with built-in surround sound, games took advantage of this technology to fully spatialize audio, resulting in games that cannot be played without sound.

Since 1992 an International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) has occurred annually. The first conference’s organizer described ICAD as having grown “out of a desire to pull together researchers in auditory data display and to fill this mutual need for sharing results, stimulating new ideas, and identifying the field as a whole.” Judging from the published proceedings, which included an appendix of informal comments regarding the conference, some attendees were disappointed in the state of the field. Sarah Bly stated that “it was discouraging that we’ve not made greater advances in the area of sonification,” and Bill Buxton wrote, “I continue to be disappointed at the lack of science and experimental/human validation of so much of the work.” By 1997, however, members of ICAD wrote that “[t]he question is no longer whether it works, or even whether it is useful, but rather, how one designs a successful sonification.” The discussion thus moved from questions of whether or not sound had a legitimate functional role to a focus on design methods. ICAD continues to serve as the primary forum for presenting research in the area [ 5].

The Macintosh and Windows operating systems of the 1990s began allowing users to customize the sounds generated by desktop interactions. Users could choose the sounds associated with various events and (perhaps most important) disable sounds completely. Interestingly, few of the sounds produced by the Apple and Microsoft operating systems appear to have been designed to take full advantage of the published research. Standard interface sounds generally consist of semi-abstract

beeps and clicks to alert the user of system and application errors and events (such as clicking on an icon), but they rarely provide any information that is not readily available visually.

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a steady stream of conference papers related to sound and computing but few major publications. One notable essay is Stephen Brewster’s chapter in the 2008 Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, which provides an extremely useful and comprehensive review of research related to sound and interface [ 6].

Future work in sound is likely to focus on mobile

devices, which have unique constraints that may make them well suited to sound-enhanced (or purely auditory) interfaces. Brewster concludes his review of nonspeech sound research by stating that “nonspeech sound has a large part to play in the near future … in mobile computing devices.” Bill Gaver says, “It seems to me that there’s lots of opportunity for exploring sound in design still. Certainly, auditory feedback plays an important, if fairly crude, role in mobile devices.”

Unfortunately, generalized guidelines regarding the use of sound have yet to emerge. This lack of design theory is all the more unfortunate because in the past 10 years, technology has advanced to the point where sampled and synthesized sounds can be easily included in almost any product at low cost. An ever-increasing range of products include myriad sounds, from mobile phones to washing machines, and thus an ever-increasing number of practicing interaction designers make decisions about sounds in products.

Designers should begin considering the sounds of their products at the concept-generation stage. If sound is not considered until late in the design process, it will not play a larger role than at present, and it is unlikely to prove any more useful than it has in the past.

[ 5] Kramer, G., ed. Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification and Auditory Interfaces, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, 557-58. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Longman, 1994. and Kramer, G. et al. Sonification Report: Status of the Field and Research Agenda. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 1997. <http://www. icad.org/websiteV2.0/ References/ nsf.html>

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Bill Gaver, Lenny Shrieber, Peter Sisk, Mei Lin, Bill English, and an anonymous editor for their help with and contributions to this article.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Paul Robare is currently pursuing a master’s in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University. His interests range from nonspeech sound and multimodal interfaces to service strategy, experience design, and games. He maintains a portfolio at www.paulrobare.com.

Jodi Forlizzi is an associate professor of design and human-computer interaction and the A. Nico Habermann Chair of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and an interaction designer contributing to design theory and practice. Her theoretical research examines theories of experience,

emotion, and social product use as they relate to interaction design. Other research and practice centers on notification systems ranging from peripheral displays to embodied robots, with a special focus on the social behavior evoked by these systems. Jodi was trained as an illustrator at Philadelphia College of Arts and as an interaction designer at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. She holds a self-defined Ph.D. in design in HCI from Carnegie Mellon.

[ 6] Brewster, S. “ Non-Speech Auditory Output.” In The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications edited by Andrew Sears and Julie A. Jacko. 2d ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007. For an exhaustive survey of research into sound and interfaces prior to the mid-1990s, see Bill Buxton’s “Speech, Language & Audition,” chap. 8 in Readings in Human Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, edited by R.M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. Buxton, and S. Greenberg, Morgan Kaufmann: 1995.