Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8.2.3.
The wider issues of the problem
On the basis of previous definitions, sonification of the hierarchical menu used
for targeted application (multimedia automobile center) therefore has several design
issues. Indeed, the information transmitted by the auditory modality must consider
both the semantic content of menus as well as the navigation position within the
structure. It is therefore possible to specify in this case the main functions the
sonification approach must satisfy:
- The clarification and the differentiation of the
meaning of menus
: each menu is
associated with a family of sounds that must ensure a good coherence within the
same menu, but also enable a good distinction between the different menus (for
example,
Communication
relates to several modes of communication and is different
to
Navigation,
which deals with data relative to various orientation and geo-
localization tools).
- Information of
vertical position
: the sound associated with a menu must be
able to show the level of depth in the structure (for example,
Directory
is the son of
Telephone
and has
Communication
as an ancestor).
- Information of
horizontal scrolling
: for a given hierarchical level, the sound
associated with each brother node must be able to show the level of progress in the
corresponding list (for example,
Albums
is situated before
Tracks
and after
Artists
in
the list that comes from
Music
).
8.3. State of the art
This state of the art puts forward a summary of the main work dealing with the
sonification of hierarchical menus, mainly carried out by researchers who come
from the previously mentioned ICAD community (see section 8.2.3) and the
ACM/CHI
3
(Association for Computing Machinery/Computer-Human Interaction)
community. The first part addresses the question of sound representation of the
hierarchical relationships within a menu, i.e. the representation of an item within a
menu by a horizontal and vertical positioned sound. The second part presents work
on the sound representation of the semantic content of items, i.e. the representation
of the object or concept that the item is referring to by a sound. The third part
presents work that tries to reconcile these two types of representation, which will
enable the introduction of the original mixed model, which is the object of this
chapter.
3 www.sigchi.org.
