A Weakly Intrusive Ambient Soundscape for

Introduction The use of audio cues in computer interfaces has seen a remarkable development in recent years with the general proliferation of soundcards and sound sources. The audio schemes in the Microsoft Windows operating systems, for example, offer the association between a rich set of system events and sounds. The events most commonly encountered are, perhaps, login and logoff events, notification of new email and the proverbial beep when something goes wrong. All these events, however, are closely tied to events and changes of state which are either obvious anyway, or without sufficient resolution to avoid being a nuisance. In this paper we present WISP, the concept of an ambient soundscape in which events and states in the computing and physical environment are reflected in the form of next to non-intrusive audio cues. A WISP is meant to service a physical space, like a personal office or a common room. The listening experience is intended to convey intuition rather than interruption; each signal should be sufficiently non-intrusive to be accepted without disturbing the focus of the task at hand, while distinctive enough to be separable from the other cues. The selection of auditory messages that humans choose to process can be seen as depending on context rather than physical characteristics (Anderson, 1995). At a cocktail party we can follow one conversation, but as we hear our name mentioned in another conversation our focus is suddenly changed. Thus we can say that auditory messages that bear meaning are the ones grasping our attention. Meaning in this sense might not always be mapped to semantics, but might as well be learned. For instance, when the sound of the telephone is heard, we know that someone probably are calling us. Auditory messages of this type are often quite disturbing, and it is also their intention to be so, to be able to grasp our attention. We propose more non-intrusive auditory messages and predict that if we map meaning to these they might be just as useful without disturbing the user in the same way as a phone signal might do, and they might even be comfortable to listen to.