An investigation of using music to provide navigation cues.

LePl�tre, Gr�gory; Brewster, Stephen A

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment that investigates new principles for representing hierarchical menus such
as telephone-based interface menus, with non-speech audio. A hierarchy of 25 nodes with a sound for each
node was used. The sounds were designed to test the efficiency of using specific features of a musical
language to provide navigation cues. Participants (half musicians and half non-musicians) were asked to
identify the position of the sounds in the hierarchy. The overall recall rate of 86% suggests that syntactic
features of a musical language of representation can be used as meaningful navigation cues. More generally,
these results show that the specific meaning of musical motives can be used to provide ways to navigate in a
hierarchical structure such as telephone-based interfaces menus

Citation

LePlâtre, G., & Brewster, S. A. (1998). An investigation of using music to provide navigation cues. Proceedings of the 1998 international conference on Auditory Display(ICAD '98), 19

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 1998
• Deposit Date: Oct 18, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 18, 2010
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 19
• Keywords: interface menus; non-speech audio; hierarchical menus; musical language; navigation cues
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/3334
• Contract Date: Oct 18, 2010