PPD/Special Project: Sonification: Charting New Waters

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9729148 The International Community on Audio Displays (ICAD) will be holding its 1997 conference in Palo Alto, California, from November 2-5, 1997. ICAD is a forum for presenting research on the use of sound to display data, monitor systems, and provide enhanced user interfaces for computers and virtual reality systems. The first day of ICAD'97 will be made up of workshops. The purpose of the workshops is to provide an informal setting where a small number of researchers (no more than 20) can have directed, in-depth discussions on singular topics of interest to the ICAD community. A workshop on "sonification" related to representing data through audio has been of considerable interest to many researchers in ICAD. Past efforts have explored ways to listen to discern components of infrared spectra samples, hear trends in seismic data, support programming and debugging, analyze financial data as well as applications in numerous domains including medicine, education and complex systems. Of particular note is the use of sonification in interfaces and applications for people with disabilities -- visual impairments and learning and cognitive disabilities. Sonification can be used to complement or replace visualizations. As a complement, sonification helps to highlight trends in data that are difficult to visualize and to offload the complexity of the visualization. As a replacement, sonification is useful in situations when hands-and-eyes are busy -- such as in a medical operating room -- or when the users are temporarily or permanently visually-impaired. This workshop will allow researchers to assess the current state of sonification research and commercial developments. From this assessment, and sharing of experiences and techniques, the participants can collectively form a research agenda for future efforts. The needed research agenda will be useful to NSF and other organizations and agencies involved in conducting or supporting basic research related to sonification and other audio displays.