Alarm and Auditory-Interface Design

110 Pages·2017·1.52 MB·English

Alarm and Auditory-Interface
Design:
Learnability of alarms and auditory-feedback for random and
meaningful melodic alarm sounds investigated in a
paired-associate paradigm.
Master Thesis
Lars Schalkwijk
Aalborg University
Sound and Music Computing
Copyright©AalborgUniversity2016
Sound and Music Computing
Aalborg University
http://www.aau.dk
Title: Abstract:
Alarm and Auditory-Interface Design:
Sounds are an important way of non-
Learnability of alarms and auditory- visual communication. In alarm- and
feedback for random and meaningful auditory-interfacedesigndifferentsounds
melodic alarm sounds investigated in a such as speech, auditory-icons and ab-
stract sounds have been suggested and
paired-associate paradigm.
were used to convey a certain alarm or
feedback function. An important factor
Theme:
for alarm and auditory-interface design is
Master Thesis
how well the sounds can be learned and
associated with their alarm label/func-
Project Period:
tion. While Auditory-icons and speech
Spring Semester 2017
soundsareeasilylearnedbutarenotvery
suitableasalarmsoundsforvariousother
Project Group: reasons, the opposite applies to abstract
Lars Schalkwijk sounds. This thesis investigated whether
drawing on conceptual metaphors and
Participant(s): meaning in short melodic alarm sounds
Lars Schalkwijk (abstract sounds) can facilitate learnabil-
ity of a set of signal-referent pairs in a
Supervisor(s): paired-associate paradigm. The results
suggest that when melodic alarm sounds
Sofia Dahl
arecomposedtosemanticallyfitthealarm
label/function,agreatdeficitinlearnabil-
Copies: 1
ity can be overcome. These results form
apromisingbasisforfurtherinvestigation
Page Numbers: 102
aboutwhichmusicalmetaphorscancreate
strong signal-referent relations and thus
Date of Completion:
increase learnability of alarms (i.e. signal-
August 27, 2017 referentpairs).
The content of this report is freely available, but publication (with reference) may only be pursued due to
agreementwiththeauthor.

Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Related Research 5
2.1 Overview of sound types and signal-referent relations . . . . . . . . 5
2.1.1 Sound types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.1.2 Signal-referent relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.1.3 Implications for research aims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Learnability of signal-referent pairs in paired-associate paradigms . 12
2.3 Meaning and metaphors of abstract sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4 Aim of the present study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 Stimuli Composition and Selection 19
3.1 Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2 Verification and selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4 Present Experiment 29
4.1 Design and hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.2 Materials and methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
4.3 Analyses and results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.3.1 Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.3.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5 Discussion 49
5.1 Signal-referent relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
5.2 Effect of sound type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
5.3 Learning curve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
5.4 Implications for alarm design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5.4.1 Associability ratings as simple measure of learnability . . . . 57
5.4.2 Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
v
vi Contents
6 Conclusion and further research 61
Bibliography 63
List of Figures 69
A Survey for the preselection of the abstract sounds 71
B Instructions 85
C PsychoPy Code of the experiment 87
Preface
ThisthesisissubmittedinfulfillmentoftheThesisExamofthe10thsemesterinthe
Sound and Music Computing master’s degree at Aalborg University Copenhagen.
Aalborg University, August 27, 2017
Schalkwijk, Lars
<[email protected]>
vii

Chapter 1
Introduction
In areas in which the user is confronted with a high amount of information and
cognitivedemand(i.e. cockpits,cars,hospitalsetc.) thecorrect,aswellasfastiden-
tificationofwarningsandalarmscanbevital. Withanincreasingamountofdigital
human-computer interfaces in general, the need for intuitive and quickly-learned
feedback becomes more and more important. Given the amount of predominantly
visual information processing in such environments (Cooper & E., 1977), auditory
signals have proven to be superior to visual alerts due to the attention-grabbing
nature of auditory signals (Edworthy & Adams, 1996) and due to their advantages
inreactiontimes(Sanders,1998). Thesefindingsprovidedgoodreasonstopresent
alarmsintheauditorymodalityratherthanvisually(McKeown&Isherwood,2007;
Petocz, Keller & Stevens, 2008).
In order to enable the user to take correct and immediate actions the different
meanings of the alarms and warnings have to be learned by the user. Associations
between the alarm sound and the information the alarm is signaling have to be
established. Thisrelationshipcanalsobedescribedassignal-referentrelation(Keller
& Stevens, 2004) in which, for example, the sound of a "siren" (signal) refers to a
"fire outbreak" (referent).
A major issue in alarm- and auditory interface design in general, is the learn-
ability and recognition of the alarms/sounds and their respective referents (Ed-
worthy,2013;Edworthy,Hellier,Titchener,Naweed&Roels,2011). Theassociation
between the signal and the referent can be difficult to form and with an increasing
amount of alarms, the learnability i.e. recognition of the correct meaning of an
auditory signal decreases (Patterson, 1982). Apart from reducing the number of
alarms used in a certain environment (Edworthy et al., 2011), it is therefore impor-
tant to further investigate how the learnability and recognition of alarms and their
corresponding referents can be improved and facilitated.
Previousresearchhasshownthatamongotherfactorssuchastheheterogeneity
of the sounds within a set of alarms (Edworthy et al., 2011; Gillard & Schutz,
1
2 Chapter1. Introduction
2016), the signal type, and especially the kind of relation between the referent and
the signal have a strong influence on how well a signal can be associated with
its respective referent (Edworthy & Hards, 1999; Edworthy et al., 2011; Edworthy,
Page,Hibbard,Kyle,Ratnage&Claydon,2014;Keller&Stevens,2004;McKeown&
Isherwood, 2007; Perry, Stevens, Wiggins & Howell, 2007; Stephan, Smith, Martin,
Parker & McAnally, 2006; Stevens, Brennan, Petocz & Howell, 2009; Ulfvengren,
2007). The most common paradigm used to investigate how well a signal can be
associatedwithareferentisthepaired-associateparadigm(Calkins,1894)inwhich
astimulusispairedwithaspecificlabelthatuponpresentationofthestimulushas
to be identified. Often, the mean accuracy of trials needed to correctly identify all
targets is used as a measure of learnability.
In the first part of the thesis, the theoretical background describing the differ-
ent relations between signal and referent are elaborated on. This sets the frame-
work for the discussion of recent and pertinent literature about the influence of
signal-referent relations on learnability and recognition of alarm sets. The dis-
cussion is followed by a summary about findings suggesting that music or short
musical sequences can convey extra-musical meaning i.e. can refer to concepts or
eventsoutsideofthemusicalrealm(Juslin,Barradas&Eerola,2015;Koelsch,2011;
Koelsch, Kasper, Sammler, Schulze, Gunter & Friederici, 2004; Painter & Koelsch,
2011). The summary formed the basis for the composition of the stimuli which
were composed to establish metaphors between the signal and the referent and
thus stronger signal-referent relations in order to increase learnability.
The experiment conducted in this study in which 9 signal-referent pairs had to
be learned, was designed to extend findings made by previous researchers show-
ing that stronger signal-referent relations that drew on prior learned associations
between the signal and the referent increased learnability (Edworthy & Hards,
1999; Edworthy et al., 2014; Keller & Stevens, 2004; McKeown & Isherwood, 2007;
Perry et al., 2007; Stephan et al., 2006; Stevens et al., 2009). While these studies
primarily focused on auditory-icons and speech sounds as signals, the aim of this
study was to investigate if a benefit from stronger signal-referent relations could
also be found for melodic stimuli and referents used in typical alarm systems and
auditory interfaces. Showing that abstract sounds can be composed in a way that
greatly facilitates learning would provide a promising starting point to uncover
different musical parameters that might help to improve the learnability of alarm
sounds and their function i.e. alarm labels.
One half of the participants performed a paired-associate task with arbitrary
signal-referent relations while for the other half a meaningful metaphorical signal-
referentrelationwasused. Itwaspredictedthatsignal-referentpairs withamean-
ingful relation would require less learning and lead to higher identification accu-
racies than those pairs being arbitrarily connected.
Inaccordancewiththepredictionsmelodiesthatwerespecificallycomposedto