Investigating Perceptual Congruence Between Data and Display Dimensions in Sonification

The relationships between sounds and their perceived meaning and connotations are complex, making auditory perception an important factor to consider when designing sonification systems. Listeners often have a mental model of how a data variable should sound during sonification and this model is not considered in most data:sound mappings. This can lead to mappings that are difficult to use and can cause confusion. To investigate this issue, we conducted a magnitude estimation experiment to map how roughness, noise and pitch relate to the perceived magnitude of stress, error and danger. These parameters were chosen due to previous findings which suggest perceptual congruency between these auditory sensations and conceptual variables. Results from this experiment show that polarity and scaling preference are dependent on the data:sound mapping. This work provides polarity and scaling values that may be directly utilised by sonification designers to improve auditory displays in areas such as accessible and mobile computing, process-monitoring and biofeedback

Features of neutralized sounds for long term evaluation

The meaning of a sound may influence its rating significantly. Therefore, a method was proposed, which removes the meaning of sound, keeping the loudness-time function the same. In essence, the sound is analyzed by FTT and, after spectral broadening, resynthesized by IFTT. Since it is impossible to remove the meaning of a sound, keeping all psychoacoustic magnitudes the same, variations are discussed for the sound produced by a noise immission of 20 min duration. For the comparison, loudness, sharpness, fluctuation strength, and roughness are considered as functions of time, and as cumulative distributions. Data for the original sound with meaning are compared to data for the neutralized sound without meaning. While the loudness-time functions of original and neutralized sound are the same, significant differences can occur with respect to roughness