Psychoacoustic sonification design for navigation in surgical interventions

Abstract

A psychoacoustically motivated sonification design to guide clinicians in two-dimensional space is presented, e.g., to navigate a scalpel towards a target resection trajectory, ablation needle towards a preplanned insertion point, or drill towards a target burrhole for craniotomy. Navigation is achieved by mapping spatial dimensions to audio synthesis parameters that affect the magnitude of different perceptual sound qualities. Orthogonal spatial dimensions are mapped to orthogonal auditory qualities. In a preliminary laboratory study, non-expert users successfully identified the target field out of 16 possible fields in 41% of all trials. The correct cardinal direction was identified in 84% of the trials. Based on both findings and further psychoacoustic considerations, the mapping range is optimized, and an implementation of an additional depth dimension is discussed

Psychoacoustical Signal Processing for Three-dimensional Sonification

“…But several physical attributes may affect them. Auditory scene analysis: Auditory scene analysis is the psychological organization of sound and is closely related to Gestalt psychology [26,20]. Portions of sound are integrated into auditory streams when they are in fair synchrony, have rather harmonic frequency relations and/or seem to come from the same spatial location.…”

“…We are in the process of carrying out the same experiments with passive listeners as in [21,20] to examine whether the halfdimensions are in fact orthogonal. Participants hear several sounds in a row, each representing one out of 16 fields on a map.…”

“…In earlier studies we already presented an implementation of psychoacoustic signal processing for two-dimensional sonification [20] and some experimental validation with passive [21,22] and interactive users [23,24,25] in a navigation task. In the paper at hand we modify the approach to enable three-dimensional sonification, e.g., for the sake of three-dimensional navigation.…”

The CURAT Sonification Game: Gamification for Remote Sonification Evaluation

“…Therefore, it is common to evaluate sonification designs in experiments with users. In studies such as, for example, [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] between 6 and 24 participants are invited to the laboratory for experiments that last several minutes. They interpret and sometimes interact with the sonification.…”

Perceptual sound field synthesis concept for music presentation

“…Thorough consideration and technical implementation of the above-mentioned psychoacoustic and auditory scene analysis principles has led to successful audio compression algorithms [23], music recommendation systems [18], auditory displays [24,25], synthesizers [26], sound source localization [27] and source width detection [13] applications and is the basis of the perceptual sound field synthesis concept for music presentation.…”