Chapter 10 Voices in the Forest : Sounds , Soundscapes and Interface Design

speech music everyday VOICES IN THE FOREST 167 Figure 2: 3D rendering of map of the Soundscape Whilst the parts of the soundscape are described at a fairly high level, they are sufficiently detailed to allow us to develop an idea of the main elements of the soundscape. If you were to stop for a moment and listen to the soundscape you are in, we suggest that you would be listening to different types of sound at different levels, and that these sounds and the interactions between them would provide you with information that would map onto the categories listed above. When approaching the design of individual elements in an artificial soundscape a framework such as Gaver’s (see above) may be turned to for an appropriately lower level of detail. However, for our purposes this model provides a useful framework for investigating the way people hear and interpret the soundscapes, not just the sounds, around them. 5. Designing Soundscapes If designers are to take advantage of the soundscape concept, then they must be willing to leave aside their visual bias. Designers must consider how the various information entities described above can best be presented and integrated. We believe that by taking a holistic view of the design and by considering the narrative presented by the soundscape, impressive interfaces to applications can be developed. Brenda Laurel has persuasively argued that interface design and theatre share many similarities, stemming from the fact that both attempt to represent real life, and that whilst these representations are not the same as real life they have real life results (Laurel, 1993). Rather than look to theatre for inspiration for soundscape design, we prefer to look to an area which has clearly exploited sound effectively; film. EXPLORING NAVIGATION 168 Outlining the key techniques involved in sound editing, Reisz and Millar (1968) begin by noting the importance of taking into account the way in which we hear sound in the everyday world. Although they remark that simply copying the way sounds appear in real life would result in a cacophony, they emphasise one cannot simply ‘cut’ from one sound to another since individual sounds are part of a soundscape and rarely suddenly appear and disappear more often sounds fade in and out of our attention in an ever changing acoustic environment. Emphasising the importance of sound in establishing a sense of place and orienting the user within it, they note that asynchronous sound is even more important than synchronous sound since it can add information about things we cannot see on screen, allowing the filmmaker to tell a more complex ‘story’ in a scene than might otherwise be possible with visuals alone. Monaco (1981) has commented that sound effects do the real work of creating the sound environment that is so important in bringing a scene to life and establishing a sense of place. Reisz and Millar (1968) also point out how sound allowed for new ways of determining pace and suggesting the passing of time. Sound is often used to direct the audience’s attention to events not currently in the foreground but which the director wants them to attend to. Visconti made dramatic use of this kind of ‘attention directing’ technique in the film Ossessione (Italy, 1942), which tells the story of lovers who kill the woman’s husband. We see the lovers meeting in a public square, but as they approach each other the camera pulls away to visually foreground a group of children playing. As we watch the children play in the visual foreground, the acoustic foreground is occupied by the sound of the lovers arguing about what to do (they are by now only barely visible in the background). Contrasting the foreground visual with the ‘foreground sound’ serves to concentrate our attention on the dialogue more tightly than had the characters themselves been in the foreground shot. Silent filmmakers had to rely on all manner of visual conventions and stylistic tricks to convey what could be communicated far more simply with a line of dialogue, a snatch of music or a sound effect. Supporting the proposal that sound altered the nature of filmmaking, Neale (1985) comments that the binding of sound and image “unifies the filmic text, the space of the auditorium and the psyche of the viewer”. here are clearly many similarities between the situations in which sound is used in the cinema and those in which it could be used in HCI. Table 1 presents these in relation to the soundscape map presented in Figure 1. Films typically make use of all four sound types, and sound is presented in all Information Category Film HCI 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Provide auditory confirmation that something has happened. Provide feedback about actions