Creating Meaningful Melodies from Text Messages

Writing text messages (e.g. email, SMS, instant messaging) is a popular form of synchronous and asynchronous communication. However, when it comes to notifying users about new messages, current audio-based approaches, such as notification tones, are very limited in conveying information. In this paper we show how entire text messages can be encoded into a meaningful and euphonic melody in such a way that users can guess a message’s intention without actually seeing the content. First, as a proof of concept, we report on the findings of an initial online survey among 37 musicians and 32 non-musicians evaluating the feasibility and validity of our approach. We show that our representation is understandable and that there are no significant differences between musicians and non-musicians. Second, we evaluated the approach in a real world scenario based on a Skype plug-in. In a field study with 14 participants we showed that sonified text messages strongly impact on the users’ message checking behavior by significantly reducing the time between receiving and reading an incoming message.