Re: What's a compelling example of sonification?

[meijer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

David 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

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