Comparison and Evaluation of Sonification Strategies for Guidance Tasks

This paper aims to reveal the efficiency of sonification strategies in terms of rapidity, precision, and overshooting in the case of a one-dimensional guidance task. The sonification strategies are based on the four main perceptual attributes of a sound (pitch, loudness, duration/tempo, and timbre) and classified with respect to the presence or not of one or several auditory references. Perceptual evaluations are used to display the strategies in a precision/rapidity space and enable prediction of user behavior for a chosen sonification strategy. The evaluation of sonification strategies constitutes a first step toward general guidelines for sound design in interactive multimedia systems that involve guidance issues.