(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-05)
Walker, Bruce N.; Davison, Benjamin K.
Members of the ICAD community might contend that auditory interfaces and even just well-designed sound in computer interfaces could be used more often than is currently the case. However, it is not entirely clear where, when, and how sound is actually being employed in everyday software. We discuss the development of a long-term research project aimed at identifying and categorizing sound use in software. Our mixed- methods approach explores software artifacts from three perspectives: detailed program behavior, source code word count of audio terms, and audio infrastructure. These complementary approaches could provide a deeper understanding of sound use today and, we hope, lead to predicting, guiding, and improving the future trajectory of its use.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-06)
Davison, Benjamin K.; Walker, Bruce N.
We report on an overhaul to the Sonification Sandbox. The Sonification Sandbox provides a cross-platform, flexible tool for converting tabular information into a descriptive auditory graph. It is implemented in Java, using the Java Sound API to generate MIDI output. An improved modular code structure provides a strong user interface and model framework for auditory graph representation and manipulation. A researcher can integrate part or the entire program into a different experimental implementation. The upgraded Sonification Sandbox provides a rich description of the auditory graph representation that can be saved or exported into various file formats. This description includes data representations of pitch, timbre, polarity, pan, and volume, along with graph contexts analogous to visual graph axes. Applications for the Sonification Sandbox include experimentation with various sonification techniques, data analytics beyond visualization, science education, auditory display for the blind, and musical interpretation of data.