Psychoacoustic Sonification as User Interface for Human-Machine Interaction
This addresses the need for effective human-machine interaction in various applications, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing psychoacoustic principles to a new interface context.
The paper tackles the problem of communicating spatial information to machine operators by introducing psychoacoustic sonification as an alternative to visual interfaces, using interactive sound to guide users to targets or avoid obstacles with precise directional and distance cues.
When operating a machine, the operator needs to know some spatial relations, like the relative location of the target or the nearest obstacle. Often, sensors are used to derive this spatial information, and visual displays are deployed as interfaces to communicate this information to the operator. In this paper, we present psychoacoustic sonification as an alternative interface for human-machine interaction. Instead of visualizations, an interactive sound guides the operator to the desired target location, or helps her avoid obstacles in space. By considering psychoacoustics --- i.e., the relationship between the physical and the perceptual attributes of sound --- in the audio signal processing, we can communicate precisely and unambiguously interpretable direction and distance cues along three orthogonal axes to a user. We present exemplary use cases from various application areas where users can benefit from psychoacoustic sonification.