Psychoacoustical Interactive Sonification for Short Range Navigation

This paper introduces an auditory display for short-range guidance tasks. It contains a psychoacoustically motivated sonification to map two orthogonal space dimensions to sound parameters that affect largely independent individual aspects of sound sensation. The sound parameters are frequency of chroma change and beating, and a controllable degree of inharmonicity, roughness, and noisiness. Additional sound elements are presented in additional auditory streams. This auditory display guides the user towards a target location by giving continuous monaural feedback. An experiment with 18 participants reveals that the auditory display is readily interpretable. The two dimensions can be distinguished, enabling users to reach the target axis-by-axis, and integrated to reach the target along the shortest path.