Subject: Re: What's a compelling example of sonification? From: at <meijerNATLAB.RESEARCH.PHILIPS.COM> Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 18:43:48 +0200David Jameson wrote: > Suppose you were a keynote speaker at the next COMDEX exhibition. Your job > is to explain to the audience why the world should care about sonification. > What would you tell them? What do you think are the potential "killer" app > that takes sonification out of the niche world into the mainstream? > > There are some obvious examples for particular communities (e.g. screen > readers for the visually disabled, perhaps the use of sound in games for > informational purposes) but I'm wondering what applications of sonification > might make a really significant percentage of people take notice and think > "I gotta have this" or even "hmmm, I'm going to buy a computer so I can > have this", specifically because of the sonification. I think you will have a very hard time finding a "killer app" that makes sonification interesting to a broad audience. In line with what you said, sonification can be valuable for educational purposes, as in learning about the relation between frequency domain and time domain sound representations, such as the on-line sonification of spectrograms allowed via the Java auditory display http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/javoice.htm and for providing new accessibility means for the visually disabled, as in the video sonification software http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/winvoice.htm presented recently at SIGGRAPH 98. I can only hope that it will be enough to make the world "care about sonification" as you put it, but we surely have a long way to go. In many other applications, sonification is often just irritating. When you find the killer app, will you tell us all about it? ;-) Are you perhaps going to speak at the next COMDEX? Good luck! Best wishes, Peter Meijer Email to AUDITORY should now be sent to AUDITORY(at)lists.mcgill.ca LISTSERV commands should be sent to listserv(at)lists.mcgill.ca Information is available on the WEB at http://www.mcgill.ca/cc/listserv