Visualizing voice locations: Amplifying the effects of spatial audio with simple displays.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780494219539
Description: The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how displays of voice locations enhance the benefits of spatialized audio communication. While existing literature suggests visualizations of voice locations aren't beneficial, earlier investigations have only examined small, familiar audio spaces. This work extends previous research by investigating the benefits of visualizing voice locations in more complex, unfamiliar audio spaces, where identification is more difficult.An exploratory study compared the benefits of low-fidelity spatialization to those previously demonstrated for high-fidelity techniques in audio-only interfaces. This study confirmed the subjective benefits of spatialization and demonstrated that knowledge of voice locations aided listeners in disambiguating similar voices. Based on these findings, three additional studies were conducted. In the second and third studies, the utility of visualizing voice locations was examined in comparison to non-spatialized and spatialized audio-only environments for a voice identification task across audio spaces of differing complexity and familiarity. These studies demonstrated that visualizing voice locations improved identification performance, particularly in audio spaces with more voices. The fourth study investigated how the relative scale of auditory and visual displays affected voice identification performance. This study demonstrated that increasing the distribution of voice locations, both for the auditory and visual display components, improved voice identification.This research produced a number of notable contributions. This was the first set of experiments to examine how audio space complexity and visual and auditory display scale affect the voice identification-related benefits of visualizing voice locations, establishing a novel methodology for evaluating voice identification performance across a variety of display conditions. Experimental findings demonstrated that visualizations of voice locations support the accurate identification of unfamiliar voices, particularly in larger, complex audio spaces. These findings also showed that the relative scale of both the auditory and the visual display components affect the identification of unfamiliar spatialized voices. Finally, this research led to the formulation of design guidelines to aid practitioners in developing display interfaces that better support voice-identification. Future studies could evaluate how the benefits of visualizations are affected by further increases in audio space complexity, as well as how spatialized audio/visual displays affect other aspects of remote collaboration.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-01, Section: B, page: 0547.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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