Efficient feedback on energy consumption is regarded as one step towards a more sustainable lifestyle. Sonification is very apt to convey such information continuously in an ambient and effective way. This paper presents a pilot system for sonifying the electric power consumption of an institute’s kitchen. The reverberation of the kitchen is changed depending on the actual consumption and its difference to a weekly baseline. If the actual consumption is low, it is mapped to a plausible kitchen reverberation. If it is high compared to the baseline, the reverberation becomes unnatural. Evaluating the system gave insights on perceptibility and acceptance of auditory augmentation in a semi-home context.
Peripheral interaction is a new approach to conveying information at the periphery of human attention in which sound is so far largely underrepresented. We report on two experiments that explore the concept of sonifying information by adding virtual reverberation to real-world room acoustics. First, to establish proof of concept, we used the consumption of electricity in a kitchen to control its reverberation in real time. The results of a second, in-home experiment showed that at least three levels of information can be conveyed to the listeners with this technique without disturbing a main task being performed simultaneously. This number may be increased for sonifications that are less critical.
We present a sonification method which we call Focused Audification (FA; previously: Augmented Audification) that allows to expand pure audification in a flexible way. It is based on a combination of single-side-band modulation and a pitch modulation of the original data stream. Based on two free parameters, the sonification's frequency range is adjustable to the human hearing range and allows to interactively zoom into the data set at any scale. The parameters have been adjusted in a multimodal experiment on cardiac data by laypeople. Following from these results we suggest a procedure for parameter optimization to achieve an optimal listening range for any data set, adjusted to human speech. Keywords Sonification • Auditory display • Audification • Auditory graph • ECG data Abbreviations D/A Digital-to-analog [converter] ECG Electrocardiogram FA Focused Audification FM Frequency modulation GUI Graphical user interface MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface QUAD Quadratic slider design in GUI (see Sect. 5.1) RMS Root mean squared SSB Single-sideband modulation SQRT Squared slider design in GUI (see Sect. 5.1
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