ABSTRACT
The world we hear is completely different from the world we experience through other sensory modalities. There are many features of the auditory world that make sound an excellent means of conveying information to the user of a system. Sound may be used in traditional alarms, in process monitoring displays, in computer system interfaces, and even to present complex multivariate data. It should be made clear that we are talking about the intentional (as opposed to incidental) use of sound. That is, sounds that are designed as part of the user interface of a system, as opposed to sounds that are unintentionally part of a system, but still convey information to a listener (e.g. the syncopated rhythm of an engine that indicates it is misfiring). Furthermore, for the most part we are considering only nonspeech audio.
