Theoretical Foundations for Sound’s Use in Multimedia Instruction to Enhance Learning

Recent technological advances now make possible the full integration of sound in instructional software. Sounds may gain and focus learner attention, reduce distracting stimuli, and make learning more engaging. In addition, they may help learners condense, elaborate on, and organize details, highlighting interconnections among new pieces of information and making connections to preexisting knowledge. Thus, sound may hold great promise for moderating acquisition, processing, and retrieval “noise” in instructional software. Unfortunately, interface and instructional design guides almost completely ignore sound, and research suggests many promising instructional uses remain largely unexplored. This paper explores information-processing and communication theoretical foundations for sound’s systematic use in the instructional communication system and proposes a framework for a program of research on instructional software’s use of sound. Technological and cost barriers to full integration of sound in instructional software have recently disappeared. Conceptual and preconceptual barriers, however, still appear to prevent software designers from using sound effectively in their instructional products. Interface books seldom discuss the use of sound, and when they do, the use most often discussed is simple verbatim narration of on-screen text (see Bickford, 1997; Cooper, 1995; Galitz, 1997; Mandel, 1997). Because most “classics” of instructional interface design were written before sound was a viable design component, sound is seldom well discussed (see Alessi & Trollip, 1985, 1991; Hannafin & Peck, 1988; Jonassen, 1988; Keller, 1987). In general, interface design guidelines identify three main uses of sound in instructional software: (a) to alert learners to errors; (b) to provide stand-alone examples (such as musical passages or digitized versions of speeches); or (c) to narrate text on the screen (for multimodal presentation, for nonreaders, or for those with auditory limitations). Review of research on sound in instructional software reveals a focus on the third use cited above, digitized or computer-generated synthetic speech narration (see Barron & Atkins, 1994; Mann, 1995; Shih & Alessi, 1996). While some outside of the educational field have considered nonspeech interface sounds (Blattner, Sumikawa, & Greenberg, 1989; Gaver, 1986), many promising uses remain unexplored.