Auditory displays deliver computer information to humans through sonification and earcons

Evidence

Auditory displays are strongly related to sonic interaction design, though the focus is more on how some information can be delivered from a computer to a human (Kramer, 1994) and less on interaction. A subfield is sonification, defined in Section 18.2, though in relation to auditory displays the focus is more on the sonification of complex and multidimensional data sets, as discussed by (Hermann and Ritter, 2004). Another area within auditory displays is earcons or auditory icons, which are brief, distinctive sounds used to represent a specific event or to convey other information, just like icons in visual displays (McGookin and Brewster, 2004). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2587

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines auditory displays, earcons, and auditory icons as a coherent terminology set.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to my One Square Inch of Silence reading on how sound conveys information; ties directed sound-bearing-information to computer interfaces.