As hardware capabilities of computer products have been expeanded in recent years, means of their interface disign are changing significantly. The growing technology can implement a new idea of using sounds to human computer interfaces. Nonetheless Interface designers don't have expertise in music.
Creating earcons is not easy for them. This study aimed to establish basic rules for creating sound design tool, and introduce some specific guidelines.
At first, this study has examined the theoretical approaches based on the accoustics and psychoacoustics. The perception of the sound is crucial for the area of auditorial user interface. The variations of the auditory user interface were reviewed such as data auralisation, musical messages, earcon, auditory icon.
Then the ways of using "earcons" in the information hierarchy are investigateed. The information hierarchy is the information structure mainly used in current interface design. Earcons, which are basically musical messges, have hirearchical structure, so that they can enhance the usability in usability in using the interfaces.
Earcons can be defined as "non-verbal musical messages that are used in the user interface to provide information to the user". The existing design guidelines for earcons are too broad to be applied to current interface systems. This study took an experiment for establishing specific design guidelines in the concept of human perception. The experiment was conducted to identify how the users recognize each timbre. Timbre is the key element for user to distinguish one node from another. Timbre can be seperated by its own character : envelope, register, material.
A prototype of eacorn design tool was developed with Visual Basic 6.0 The prototype is consist of 7 modules : module for creating auditory map, module for setting the principle of navigation, module for arranging the distribution of timbre, module for setting the rhythm, module for setting the harmony, module for setting the pitch and dynamics, and test module.
With this prototype the study developed an auditory map for a cellular phone interface, and conducted a usability test with a computer simulation. The previous guidelines were identified with some problems, and revised based on the findings of the test. This revised guideline may be the part of the auditorial user interfaces.
