Toward the Design and Evaluation of Continuous Sound in Tangible Interfaces: The Spinotron
Résumé
This paper reports on an approach to the design of continuous sonic feedback in tangible interfaces, and on quantitative evaluation methods intended to guide such design tasks. The issues it addresses may be of central relevance to areas of the emerging discipline of Sonic Interaction Design that have begun to address the unique problems of designing sound for highly interactive contexts. A set of experiments was conducted to assess two key aspects of the sonic design developed for an abstract object designed for these experiments, which we refer to as the Spinotron. In the first, a comparison of sound source identification is made between three cases: passive listening to temporally static interface sounds; passive listening to dynamically evolving sounds; and listening to sounds generated through active manipulation of the artifact. The results show that control over the sound production process modulates how listeners perceive the cause of the sounds.