Creating Meaningful Melodies from Text Messages

Florian Alt, Alireza S. Shirazi, Stefan Legien, Albrecht Schmidt, and Julian Mennenöh

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

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 on-line 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.

Citation:

Florian Alt, Alireza S. Shirazi, Stefan Legien, Albrecht Schmidt, and Julian Mennenöh. 2010. Creating Meaningful Melodies from Text Messages. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1177713

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Alt2010,
 abstract = {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 on-line 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.},
 address = {Sydney, Australia},
 author = {Alt, Florian and Shirazi, Alireza S. and Legien, Stefan and Schmidt, Albrecht and Mennen\''{o}h, Julian},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1177713},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {instant messaging, sms, sonority, text sonification},
 pages = {63--68},
 title = {Creating Meaningful Melodies from Text Messages},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2010/nime2010_063.pdf},
 year = {2010}
}