Sounds generated in an interactive physical system will be meaningful not due primarily to their resemblance to natural sounds but because they will behave consistently within a multimodal experience. Sound may be synthesized from orthogonal parameters such as amplitude, frequency, and waveform, however the perception of these as orthogonal within a single sound is a questionable expectation. Information emerges from these structures when a listener attends to them over extended timespans. Extended listening is not encouraged by rather the brief, disconnected soundbytes that constitute most desktop workstation auditory displays. Virtual auditory space can be imagined as a continuous fabric of potential sound events ranging from brief signals and reiterated beacons to extended music-like evolutions of abstract sound.
Music performance offers a paradigm for virtual interaction.
Musicians operate sophisticated machines in realtime using continuous feedback to monitor and adjust their actions. VR as an interface for performance of complex parallel computations can lead to the development of a new class of data structures and computational paradigms. Correlated multimodal display is a necessary component for highly-cognitive interactions.