Background

Auditory Displays and Sonification are increasingly being used for exploring data, monitoring complex processes, or assisting exploration and navigation of data spaces. Sonification utilises the auditory sense by transforming data into sound, allowing the human user to get valuable information from data by using their natural listening skills. The main differences of sound displays over visual displays are that sound can:

• Represent frequency responses in an instant (as timbral characteristics)
• Represent changes over time, naturally
• Allow microstructure to be perceived
• Rapidly portray large amounts of data
• Alert listener to events outside the current visual focus
• Holistically bring together many channels of information

Auditory displays typically evolve over time since sound is inherently a temporal phenomenon. Interaction with the data thus becomes an integral part of the process in order to select, manipulate, excite or control the display, and this has implications for the interface between humans and computers. In recent years it has become clear that there is an important need for research to address the interaction with auditory displays more explicitly.

Call for papers

Interactive Sonification is the new upcoming research topic concerned with the use of sound to portray data, but where there is a human being at the heart of an interactive control loop. This special issue encourages submissions that focus on:

• interfaces between humans and auditory displays;
• mapping strategies and models for creating coherency between action and reaction (e.g. acoustic feedback, but also combined with haptic or visual feedback);
• perceptual aspects of the display (how to relate actions and sound, e.g. cross-modal effects, importance of synchronisation);
• applications of interactive sonification;
• evaluation of performance, usability and multi-modal interactive systems including auditory feedback;
• sonification for data analysis and mining;
• computational models of sonification;
• practical systems and working prototypes.

Submission Procedures and Deadlines

To submit a paper for this special issue, please submit a 1-page abstract to the guest editors by Fri April 2nd 2004. Further timings are as follows:

• Fri 2nd April 2004. One-page abstract, the names and affiliations of the author(s), and the details of the corresponding author (sent to guest editors via email).
• Tuesday 11th May 2004. Full paper due.
• Monday 16th August 2004. Authors notified of conditionally accepted papers.
• Friday 24th September 2004. Revisions of all accepted papers due.
• Friday 26th November 2004 Final versions due.

Potential Online/CD-ROM Opportunity

We also encourage multimedia presentations of demos or examples of the concepts presented in the submitted papers, which may be published online and possibly on a CD-ROM. Submissions of multimedia material will be reviewed in relation to the relevance and value they add to the paper to which they refer.

Guest Editors

Andy Hunt, University of York, UK, email: Andy Hunt
Thomas Hermann, Bielefeld University, Germany, email: Thomas Hermann