Using audio to enhance information tasks

constant communication with an intelligence analyst at operations command, and receives orders through an earpiece to don chemical-protection equipment because of new chemical weapons threat intelligence in the area. The chemical-protection suit is similar to but weighs less than those in use today. Most importantly, because it encloses the soldier's head, the suit has an augmented hearing system that in the fighting environment lets the soldier hear the world around him or her. Suit on and read to go, the soldier stealthily moves through the streets. Ahead, the enemy appears on a personal infrared display. Then a faint, worrisome sound catches the soldier's attention. It's obviously not from the soldier's group, and it is quietly approaching from a specific location behind him or her. The intelligence analyst who alerted the soldier is in a command center hundreds of miles away, monitoring wide-area ground-, air-, and space-based sensors, communications networks, and intelligent agents and foraging for relevant information. The command center workstation has a 120-degree curved screen that displays a constantly changing information mosaic. The display would be overwhelming and the communication would be gibberish were it not for attention-management software that uses audio cues to tell the analyst where to look and formats the communications into manageable streams. The audio display also uses background sound to provide status information on critical systems and intelligence. In fact, before this new audio software existed, it would have been impossible for one person to perform the job. This vignette describes new audio capabilities that are not just technologies; it also reflects an understanding of how to use audio to support information tasks. The following assertions underlie these new capabilities: • Meaningful non-speech sounds can function like words. • Sound design is a critical factor in the effective use of sound. • Sonification is an option for conveying information. • Sound can make visual attention significantly more efficient. Let's take a look at how these assertions combine to improve our abilities to process information. In the vignette, the sounds the soldier and analyst hear are effective because they trigger rapid cognitive interpretation. Their design is consistent with the results of recent studies that bring new insights about neurocognitive processing of environmental sounds—particularly, the processing of readily identifiable sounds. 1 These researchers found that meaningful sounds and words activate similar cortical areas in similar time spans. This means we access highly identifiable sounds' meanings as …