Using music as a communication medium

Alty, James L.; Rigas, Dimitrios; Vickers, Paul

doi:10.1145/1120212.1120234

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…Music has been employed in interfaces to help users identify programming bugs (Vickers and Alty 2002), understand algorithms (Alty et al 1997) and navigate unfamiliar locations (Jones et al 2008). These examples of the use of music in an HCI context retain the primary objective of communicating auditory messages to users via the auditory channel.…”

Section: Music Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Human-Computer Interaction

Holland¹,

Wilkie²,

Mulholland³

et al. 2013

Springer Series on Cultural Computing

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Musical instruments have a property of long-term engagement: people frequently become so engaged with them that they practice and play them for years, despite receiving no compensation other than enjoyment. We examine this phenomenon by analysing how the intrinsic motives mastery, autonomy, and purpose are built into the design of musical instruments; because, according to the self-determination theory of motivation, these three motives impact whether an activity might be found enjoyable. This analysis resulted in the identification of seven abstract qualities, inherent to the activity of music making or to the design of musical instruments, which contribute to the three intrinsic motives. These seven qualities can be treated as heuristics for the design of human-computer interfaces that have long-term engagement. These heuristics can be used throughout the design process, from the preliminary stage of idea generation to the evaluation stage of finished prototypes. Interfaces with instrument-like long-term engagement would be useful in many applications, both inside and outside the realm of music: they seem particularly suited for applications based on the attainment of long-term goals, which can be found in fields such as physical fitness, rehabilitation, education, and many others. In this chapter, we discuss an interface prototype we created and its pending evaluation. This interface, a rehabilitative rhythm game, serves as a case study showing how the heuristics might be used during the design process.

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Section: Music Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Human-Computer Interaction

Holland¹,

Wilkie²,

Mulholland³

et al. 2013

Springer Series on Cultural Computing

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“…Even without the help of tactile perception, J.L. Alty points out that music is usable as the main means of communication, with three centres of interest: the communication of musical algorithms, debugging, and communication for blind people [10]. Regarding this third area, A. Darvishi uses sound synthesis in a virtual environment accessible to the blind, each sound being the result of a particular configuration of the environment [9].…”

Section: Some Studies Encourage the Making Of Audio Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pyvox 2: An Audio Game Accessible to Visually Impaired People Playable without Visual Nor Verbal Instructions

Gaudy¹,

Natkin²,

Archambault³

2009

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. In games, we can discern two approaches to learn how interactivity works: the instructions for use and the interactivity itself. The number of spoken languages is evaluated at more than six thousand eight hundred: for this reason, instructions for use can't make games understandable for all potential users, which is especially true for audio games accessible to visually impaired players, since those games can not count on visual support and have small budgets. Such games don't provide translation, perhaps because of a lack of cost effectiveness. So, if the purpose of a game is to learn in a friendly but challenging way how interactivity can become complex, why not start this process from the very beginning, without the need of textual instructions? Some musical toys have their sighted users accomplish very simple actions in a funny way, without the need of instructions for use. Moreover, video games show us that it is possible to separate the learning process of a complex task in small steps easy to master. We have made a game according to those principles and realized an experiment to test it. All the players managed to progress in the game but not all understood all the principles of the game. For this kind of game, we assume that players do not have to understand the game during the first contact but they have to be encouraged to continue interaction. At last, the increase of the difficulty level has to be very progressive.

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“…Ever since the audio channel has been used to convey information in human/machine interfaces, various authors have addressed the issue of using music [1, 3,4]. Blattner and Greenberg [4] write: "Music has a communicative aspect not limited to the absolutes of spoken language.…”

Section: Why Use Music?mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Investigation of Using Music to Provide Navigation Cues

Leplâtre

Brewster

1998

Electronic Workshops in Computing

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This paper describes an experiment that investigates new principles for representing hierarchical menus such as telephone-based interface menus, with non-speech audio. A hierarchy of 25 nodes with a sound for each node was used. The sounds were designed to test the efficiency of using specific features of a musical language to provide navigation cues. Participants (half musicians and half non-musicians) were asked to identify the position of the sounds in the hierarchy. The overall recall rate of 86% suggests that syntactic features of a musical language of representation can be used as meaningful navigation cues. More generally, these results show that the specific meaning of musical motives can be used to provide ways to navigate in a hierarchical structure such as telephone-based interfaces menus.

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Using music as a communication medium

Cited by 11 publications

References 9 publications

Music and Human-Computer Interaction

Music and Human-Computer Interaction

Pyvox 2: An Audio Game Accessible to Visually Impaired People Playable without Visual Nor Verbal Instructions

An Investigation of Using Music to Provide Navigation Cues

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