Musical Guidance

Music and sound effects have long since been used in movie making, and recently also in computer games and multimedia, to emphasize and carry the visual message. The use of such non-speech sounds are vital to the story-telling in these areas, and a more or less structured musical language has developed, where certain musical attributes can be mapped to specific events, characters and moods. This area of research has been investigated by e.g. Philip Tagg.

From Hitchcock's "Psycho".

It's clear that film music is a very strong information carrier and "mood emphasizer". Before sound came to the movies, films were accompanied by a piano player in the theatres. The visual information just wasn't enough, especially when compared to the opera and common theatre.

But sound as an information carrier is important not only in the movies. In our everyday life we use all of our senses to get a comprehensive view of different situations. For example, when driving a car, we listen to the engine to know when to shift gears. A discordant sound may attract our attention and tell us that something is wrong.

With the exception of computer games and multimedia, the use of sounds in computer user interfaces has been sparse and primarily concerned notification of specific, often erroneous events. A lot of work in this area has focused on adding sounds to specific objects, functions or events in a graphically dominated interface, as in Earcons [3].

However, some recent research has investigated the use of ambient sounds for conveying background information [5], and using musical patterns as information carriers [1, 2]. It has also been suggested that the development of musical interfaces should focus on how the emotional meaning of musical sentences, rather than its formal structure, can be used as a communication medium [3].