Audio Navigation in a Cyberspace Village
There are many kinds of navigation where audio plays an important role. Taking a walk in our analog world we see and hear our surroundings. We may not realize we are actively listening until an unusual sound grabs our attention or someone calls our name, or we hear a sound that reminds of that old car our uncle use to drive. Memorable sounds make our world meaningful and help us to find our way between the external world, our memories, and our perception of the present. New sounds can help us to describe and understand new things.
For Siggraph 95 we have created audio tools for generating listening environments in cyberspace. We are assisting other members of Interactive Communities to generate sounds that will help locate them in cyberspace and tell about their projects. Providing sound synthesis software and expertise, the NCSA Audio Development Group assists in the creation of auditory signatures to identify sites on the Interactive Communities network. An auditory signature is a symbolic, interactive mini-scenario in sound, descriptive of the content and activity on a network node.
To travel in cyberspace we provide a large-screen interactive graphic representation accompanied by 3-D sound. SIGGRAPH visitors can "walk around" a visualization of the Interactive Communities exhibit space and hear sonic representations of activities occurring at nodes and neighborhoods. Participating exhibits send data over LAN to the navigation site. The data represents content and activity at the exhibits. Algorithms that synthesize sounds create auditory signals using data received from the exhibits. Sounds are created in software and rendered in real-time using the NCSA Sound Server, a unique sound synthesis software environment. The behavior of the sounds tells the story of what is going on at one or more exhibits as you "walk" past them in cyberspace. As visitors walk from neighborhood to neighborhood, the audio ambiance changes, reflecting the characteristic differences of the exhibits in each neighborhood.
We hope with this project to bring the cyberspace and computer graphics communities a few steps closer to using sound that is personalized and interactive. We encourage visual artists and designers to include sound composition early in the design process, while basic functionalities are still under construction. We look forward to the day when mainstream desktop computers are packaged with audio as well as graphical rendering engines.