Principles for Improving Interaction in Telephone-Based Interfaces

EPSRC project GR/L66373

Oct/97 - Oct/2000

Tool for producing navigation sounds

A fundamental issue with regards to sound design is to be able to carry out the design of sounds flexibly. For instance, sound designers should be able to modify a parameter of a sonification without having to record the whole set of sounds again. This is a critical factor while creating large sets of hierarchical sounds where the modification of a parameter of a sound implies the modification of all subsequent sounds in the hierarchy.

This flexibility does not only mean a reduction in implementation time. Providing means to interactively create sounds and integrate them into a devics allows a trial and error approach which is essential in sound design. In order to benefit from this approach, we have developed a tool that allows a designer to create sounds, integrate them in a simulation of a mobile phone menu, navigate in the sonified menu, transform the sounds and be able to use the modified prototype at any time.

This approach does not only apply to the sonification of mobile phone menus, but to any sonifiable object. Therefore, we are considering making this tool generic and support the sonification of objects such as graphical widgets (see the toolkit project).

The tool, which is still at an early stage of development, can be downloaded in its current version. This is a Java application compiled with the JDK 1.3 beta.