An evaluation of earcons for use in auditory human-computer interfaces

Abstract

An evaluation of earcons was carried out to see whether they are an effective means of communicating information in sound. An initial experiment showed that earcons were better than unstructured bursts of sound and that musical timbres were more effective than simple tones. A second experiment was then carried out which improved upon some of the weaknesses shown up in Experiment 1 to give a significant improvement in recognition. From the results of these experiments some guidelines were drawn up for use in the creation of earcons. Earcons have been shown to be an effective method for communicating information in a human-computer interface.Providing information in an auditory form could generally help solve this problem and allow visually disabled users the same facilities as the sighted.This evaluation is part of a research project looking at the best ways to integrate audio and graphical interfaces. The research aims to find the areas in an interface where the use of sound will be most beneficial and also what types of sounds are the most effective for communicating information.One major question that must be answered when creating an auditory interface is: What sounds should be used? Brewster [2] outlines some of the different systems available. Gaver's auditory icons have been used in several systems, such as the SonicFinder [5], SharedARK [6] and ARKola [7]. These use environmental sounds that have a semantic link with the object they represent. They have been shown to be an effective form of presenting information in sound. One other important, and as yet untested, method of presenting auditory information is the system of earcons [1, 13, 14]. Earcons are abstract, synthetic tones that can be used in structured combinations to create sound messages to represent parts of an interface. Blattner et al. define earcons as "non-verbal audio messages that are used in the computer/user interface to provide information to the user about some computer object, operation or interaction". Earcons are composed of motives, which are short, rhythmic sequences of pitches with variable intensity, timbre and register.

Overcoming the Lack of Screen Space on Mobile Computers

“…Simple Earcons [19,20] were used for the audio feedback. Earcons are abstract, synthetic tones that can be used in structured combinations to create sound messages to represent parts of an interface.…”

“…By using more complex manipulations of the parameters of sound hierarchical earcons can be created [21] which allow the representation of hierarchical structures. Detailed investigations of earcons by Brewster, Wright & Edwards [19] showed that they are an effective means of communicating information in sound. The sounds were designed using earcon construction guidelines proposed by Brewster et al [22], given the restrictions imposed by the Palm III.…”

A Serious Game for the Learning of Vibrotactile Feedbacks Presented under the Foot: How Many and How Fast?

“…Introduced by Brewster et al [3], they are described as structured abstract messages that can be used to communicate messages via vibration patterns. Guidelines for their design are presented in [15]. As an example, tactons can be formed by varying frequencies f a and f b in (1).…”

“…The set of four tactons that could be associated to each risk is already sets by preliminary experimentation. Here, used tactons are designed according to the guidelines presented in [15].…”

Acoustic Rendering of Data Tables Using Earcons and Prosody for Document Accessibility

“…Prosody manipulation, however, was very successful on providing the means for header/data cell distinction and row start/end within a nested structure [3]. Earcons and auditory icons have been used extensively in auditory humancomputer interfaces [19]. Earcons are used to communicate context such as hierarchies [20], depict visual categorisation [21], for menu navigation in graphical user interfaces [22], telephone interfaces [23] and mobile phones [24].…”