Spatialization and Timbre for Effective Auditory Graphing

Abstract: Spatialization (spatial separation) and timbre are the two salient auditory attributes facilitating a better comprehension of sonification (non-speech auditory display).While directional cues provide obvious interpretable structure for auditory display, timbre provides semantic expression by highlighting identity of auditory stream. This paper aims to explore (1) the impact of spatial separation for a divided attention task and (2) the efficiency of timbre to assist contour identification. The observation was applied to auditory graphing, which can be used to represent a wide variety of numerical data sets. The results help provide empirical evidence, contribute to a further investigation of spatialization and timbre employed within an auditory display context of a real-world scenario (e.g. sonification of digitalized social data).