Sonification Design for Real-Time Processes: Issues and a Demonstration

Abstract

While interest is growing in the possible advantages of sonifiying physiological information in the operating room, principles to guide the design of sonifications have not been folly developed. An unresolved question concerns the number of auditory streams that can be monitored and the number of auditory dimensions carrying information within a stream that can be monitored. This question has implications for the effective operation of selective and divided attention. This experiment explored the perceptual limits of attending to six acoustic parameters of one sound stream. A range of discriminable differences was developed for each of six acoustic parameters. Performance on a discrimination task for all six acoustic parameters was significantly different from chance when only one acoustic parameter changed. Performance levels significantly different from chance were obtained for five of the six acoustic parameters when one other distractor parameter also changed. However, performance dropped to below chance for all parameters when five distractor parameters also changed. The results are discussed in the context of ongoing research that approaches the design problem from both a perceptual perspective and a cognitive, strategic perspective.