Another ICAD and many more happy memories. Stephen, Matt, Paul and Christian really made the conference work well and left only Internet connections to be desired. The long haul situation is something I'll be much more aware of in future as it really does drain participants. The overall quality of the conference was as Greg Kramer put it increasing in quality since Sante Fe but I still think we as a community are away's off from the established ACM/IEEE but this was only evident in a few of the sessions. Having to help in organising next year's conference ensured that I was considering aspects of the conference which I'd normally not be paying as much attention to but I would say overall that Sydney ranks second after Helsinki in my book.

The papers and presentations were in general of a high standard. The ones I found of particular note and relevance are as follows:

The Audio Abacus is an interesting application for sonifying numeric data which uses a somewhat established metaphor of an abacus.The work by Walker et al [1] was interesting and had a definite resonance with the community helping to establish an early note of what an atypical sonification project is about to conference newcomers. The work also showed how many of the better labs are going down the Mac OS X audio path.

A paper entitled "Importance of Interaction in Sonification" by Hunt and Hermann (Hermann presenting) [2] builds on the new and increasingly important area of combining human computer interaction and sonification. This paper builds and cements the foundations of this area which while is has existed in the community has never really been formalised. This area was defined and formalised by the authors at the Interactive Sonification workshop in Bielefeld, held in January 2004 (Click here to see my report on this workshop). While currently a predominantly European grouping this subspecies of ICAD delegate will surely grow as it was formally confirmed by Thomas Hermann that the workshop will be held in Europe on year's when ICAD will not be held in Europe. This is an interesting area of research especially with both authors groups developing toolkits and applications to emphasis the work in the area. Sandra Paletto's [3] work on "A Toolkit for Interactive Sonification" is an example, which was also presented at the conference.

Gregory Leplatre's [4] presentation on "How to tackle auditory interface aesthetics?" was another important talk which again raises and reminds us about the issues of aesthics in our sonifications and auditory display designs. This issue was echoed by Paul Vickers [5] in his talk "External Auditory Representation of Programs" and he highlighted the need for cross-disciplinary approach as what an engineer may consider aesthically pleasing could benefit from the inputs and insights of a artistic/musical professional.

The Marketbuzz system by Janata and Childs (Childs presenting) [6] was one of two papers which I was particular interested in as they have direct relevance to my PhD research and I wasn't disappointed. Marketbuzz presented two experiments, firstly a "change of direction" monitoring task and secondly a combined "change of direction with a distractor task of number matching". The system sonified four movement / data patterns which occur within financial trading. These patterns were relative movement, absolute movement, approach to a preset target and bid-ask stack. The sonifications were based on an earcon design methodology. The initial results seem promising but larger scale testing is required. The second paper of interest was by Mauney and Walker [7], entitled "Creating Functional and Livable Soundscape for Peripheral Monitoring of Dynamic Data". This was another financial system which had a sonification applied to it to help users interpret real time data. It differs from the last approach in three distinct areas. Its sonification was based on an ecological design methodology and it presented a continuous soundscape rather than a direct event sonification. It should be noted that in its scheme it does react and change the soundscape according to events but this occurs within a continuous auditory stream. The third difference to the previous system was in the choice of movement / data patterns. This system used two patterns, these were percentage change and a simple moving average, both of which are well established techniques used by technical traders. The system itself was implemented as a module based on interpreting various rules from the data feed which were used to define the various acoustic rules. These were then rendered to the the soundscape using JASS [8]. As with the prior work, only a small initial study was carried out so more detailed studies are required to validate the results.

Both of these systems highlight several important issues with the current generation of sonification systems., One is the normal use of a small or entirely college based test groups, I would refer to study by Woolrych and Cockton for the small groups, "Why and When Five Test Users aren't Enough" [9] which highlights some issues with small numbers in studies. When testing with undergraduate students, one must simply pose the question "Are undergraduate students the final end users of the system?". As guilty as many of my colleagues in these cases, I hope that while we have limitations such as these that we should still try for larger and more diverse test groups. Another issue relates to sound design and its related black magic [10], is that while we can often present excellent single informational channel sonifications, how can we present multiple channel sonifications which truly work. To clarify, I use informational channel to refer to a channel of information or data. These are two of the most pressing areas facing the community and which I believe we should focus our collective efforts on and remember in when performing our experimental designs.

Another useful paper was "Geometric Shape Detection with SoundView" by van del Doel et al [11]. This work looks at shape detection using haptic feedback combined with sonification. It details four experiments, the first two I found of particular relevance to similar work at my lab. This research highlights the potential for using sonification in conjunction with haptics for shape recognition but as with most studies further work is required. The results along with work by Fernström et al [12] show that this type of display offers a potential for a vision substitute as a display option.

The final paper which I found of relevance to my work was by Haixia Zhao et al [13] "Sonification of Geo-Referenced Data for Auditory Information Seeking". The work builds on Shneiderman's Visual Information Seeking Principle by the addition of the category of gist. Gist is where a quick grasp of the overall data is conveyed by a sonification. This is a useful concept to add to the earlier work. The sonification and results presented in the talk showed some useful for sonification but I think a better sound design would have improved the overall results of the study.

The "Listening to the Mind Listening" concert deserves a special mention as both a great success and as an exemplar of what wonderful concerts can be achieved when science and art fuse together. Thankfully due to the many project which use these elements the local Australians has had some experience with this type of piece as shown by the works listed in the Australian Sound Project.

In the wrapping up of the conference, we head that the ICAD book (new version) should be in a rough draft in time for next year's conference. John Neuhoff's book on "Ecological Psychoacoustics" is now available (click here for Amazon link) so go and buy a copy! There are also some pictures from the conference available online. Next year's conference will be held in lovely Limerick for more information checkout the web site. Below are a couple of dates for interesting workshop to be held over the next couple of months which may be of interest. As part of next year's committee I'll finish this report with a traditional Irish (Gaeilge) welcome "Cead mile failte" and look forward to welcoming you all to Limerick for next year's conference.

Sound Design Workshop - October 13th : 15th - held by the French Acoustic Society in Paris, at Ircam, Paris, France. Sound in Mobile and Ubiquitous Human Computer Interaction - September 13th - at Mobile HCI Conference, Glasgow, Scotland.

Below are a couple of nice shots from Kuala Lumpur which I stopped off in for a couple of days on the way back west.

Here a link back to my trip report page or you can just head back to my homepage.

References:

[1] B. N. Walker, J. Lindsay, and J. Godfrey, "The Audio Abacus: Representing A Wide Range of Values With Accuracy and Precision," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[2] A. Hunt and T. Hermann, "The Importance of Interaction In Sonification," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[3] S. Pauletto and A. Hunt, "A Toolkit for Interactive Sonification," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[4] G. Leplâtre and I. McGregor, "How to Tackle Auditory Interface Aesthetics? Discussion and Case Study," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[5] P. Vickers, "External Auditory Representations of Programs: Past, Present, and Future An Aesthetic Perspective," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[6] P. Janata and E. Childs, "Marketbuzz: Sonification of Real-Time Financial Data," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[7] B. S. Mauney and B. N. Walker, "Creating Functional and Livable Soundscapes for Peripheral Monitoring of Dynamic Data," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[8] K. van den Doel and D. K. Pai, "JASS: A Java Audio Synthesis System for Programmers," presented at Internation Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-01), Helsinki, Finland, 2001.

[9] A. Woolrych and G. Cockton, "Why and When Five Test Users aren't Enough," presented at IHM-HCI 2001, Toulouse, 2001.

[10] D. Sonnenschein, Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema , 1st ed. Studio City, CA, USA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2001.

[11] K. van den Doel, D. Smilek, A. Bodnar, C. Chita, R. Corbett, D. Nekrasovski, and J. McGrenere, "Geometric Shape Detection with SoundView," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.

[12] M. Fernström and E. Brazil, "Human-Computer Interaction Design based on Interactive Sonification – Hearing Actions or Instruments/Agents," presented at International Workshop on Interactive Sonification, Bielefeld University, Germany, 2004.

[13] H. Zhao, C. Plaisant, B. Shneiderman, and R. Duraiswami, "Sonification of Geo-Referenced Data for Auditory Information Seeking: Design Principle and Pilot Study," presented at International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-04), Sydney, Australia, 2004.