The Breakbits Interface

The BreakBits interface is intended as a complement to the traditional, mainly graphical, interface. The aim is to help the user concentrate on the most relevant information by giving musical guidance. Rather than directly mapping different sounds to specific events, the purpose is to continuously present information about the status of the computing environment processes in an emotional and discreet manner. Thereby, the user would get an overall experience of the ongoing processes and a guidance to the most relevant information at a specific moment.

The relevance of the information is described primarily by how prominent a certain part is in the music. When important transitions and deviations occur, such as when the load on one of the servers become too high, the music may get into a state more in the foreground of the user’s focus. The following scenario illustrates the BreakBits concept:

Susan is a system administrator. She is writing a report in a word processor when she remembers that she must upgrade one of the mailservers before lunch. She quickly launches the remote installation sequence and goes back to her word processor as a piano complements the already playing background music. After a while, the piano music is supplemented with a quiet drum rhythm. Susan knows that this signifies the initiation of the file server's automatic backup procedure.

Since the music is laid-back and harmonic, she hardly pays it any attention and continues writing. A couple of minutes later, the drum rhythm gradually becomes louder and starts to slow down. Susan switches to the monitoring window of the backup procedure and discovers that it is soon about to run out of tape. She walks to the adjacent server room and loads a new tape into the backup device. Soon after changing tapes, the drum rhythm returns to its normal level.

In this example, BreakBits helped Susan to focus on the most relevant information from the system. Using a traditional interface, it would be hard to actively monitor the different processes all the time. With BreakBits, she could concentrate on her writing and still be aware of important stages in the ongoing processes, allowing her to take action, before being presented with an annoying alert box.

Many other processes were also active in the background, manifesting themselves in the smooth musical flow, but since they were of less importance to Susan at the moment, she did not pay any attention to them.

This is our suggested system schematics, showing the process responsible for the auditory display. Click to enlarge.