PARALLEL EARCONS - REDUCING THE LENGTH OF AUDIO MESSAGES

This paper describes a method of presenting structured audio messages, earcons, in parallel so that they take less time to play and can bett er keep pace with interactions in a human-computer interface. The two component parts of a compound earcon are played in parallel so that th e time taken is only that of a single part. An experiment was conducte d to test the recall and recognition of parallel compound earcons as c ompared to serial compound earcons. Results showed that there are no d ifferences in the rates of recognition between the two groups. Non-mus icians are also shown to be equal in performance to musicians. Some ex tensions to the earcon creation guidelines of Brewster, Wright and Edw ards are put forward based upon research into auditory stream segregat ion. Parallel earcons are shown to be an effective means of increasing the presentation rates of audio messages without compromising recogni tion rates. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited