Rhetorical Strategies for Sound Design and Auditory Display: A Case Study

Auditory Display (AD) and Sonic Interaction Design (SID) are fast growing research domains. The former investigates strategies and modalities for providing information by means of nonverbal sounds. The latter deals with the use of sound in ID. New energies have recently been injected into these fields by a number of European-supported research efforts such as the projects S2S2 (Sound to Sense, Sense to Sound, see http://smcnetwork.org/), CLOSED (Closing the Loop Of Sound Evaluation and Design, see http://closed.ircam.fr/), and the European COST-Action Sonic Interaction Design (see http://sid.soundobject.org/). Nevertheless, it is commonly held within the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD, see www.icad.org) that AD and SID lack consolidated methodological guidelines. This article proposes rhetoric as a rich repository of principles and techniques and a solid methodological base on which to build new knowledge and expertise in the domains of AD and SID. Classical rhetoric deals with economy and effectiveness of communication through speech. The idea of transferring the tradition and experience of rhetoric from verbal language to another realm is centuries old. Since the 16th century, the transposition of classical rhetorical principles and techniques from the verbal domain to the musical has made an important contribution to the transformation of instrumental music into an independent art form. Instrumental music has since been able to develop its own structures and discourse independently of verbal expression, theatrical representation or dance. Inspired by this example, this study examines the potential to employ musical rhetorical strategies for the design of non-speech audio in the realm of ID and HCI. We argue that what we propose is congruent with a general trend in ID pointing to an increasingly human-centered and ergonomic technology, both physically and psychologically. In this sense, the re-invention and adaptation of communication techniques developed within pure humanistic frameworks to the context of ID seems to be a coherent and promising research strategy in favor of such a general goal.