ABSTRACT
In competitive sports, testing and training equipment is used to monitor and optimize the training process and to analyze and improve the performance of athletes. These technologies offer coaches and athletes innovative and effective support. Sports science research provides empirical evidence that the use of synthesized additional audio information (data-driven sonification) as interactive feedback has positive effects on the accuracy of perception, the reproduction and regulation of movement patterns as well as on motor control and learning. Providing objective data on technical devices quantifies the information and enables the detection of deviations in the movement being performed. To meet the needs of a specific field, the measurement and analysis systems are developed by engineers in collaboration with scientists, biomechanics and coaches. In addition to biomechanical aspects, the athletes’ subjective perception and individual idea of the movement should be considered. Thus, the interface between human and computer becomes an integral part of the process of selecting, manipulating or controlling the display. This chapter aims at describing the design of interactive real-time audio feedback systems for sport applications. Focus is on the development of specially adapted sonification algorithms for real-time sound synthesis and the information transfer to the athlete.
