Sound design in interfaces is an extension of product sound quality

Evidence

A field connected strongly to product sound quality is sonic interaction design. In sonic interaction design, methods that use sound to convey information, meaning, and aesthetic or emotional qualities in interactive contexts are exploited (Franinovic and Serafin, 2013), thus extending the field of communication acoustics in the direction of interaction design, where human– computer interfaces are studied. Digital devices communicate with the user using non-speech sounds, which is analogous to product sound quality, where sounds made by devices convey information on the state of the device. In this field, the sounds are specially designed and digitally synthesized to communicate this information. … Sonification. The goal of sonification is to represent data provided by any process in the form of sound, so that the user can perceive or interpret the conveyed information just by listening (Hermann et al., 2011). In a practical example, the angling of a drilling machine is sonified in order to help the user to drill holes more accurately (Großhauser and Hermann, 2010). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2569

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines sonic interaction design as a subfield of communication acoustics.
• SEED: Sonification of drill angle is a concrete application case worth building into a broader article on acoustic UX and data sonification.