[talks] ​Katie Anna Wolf will present her Pre-FPO "Techniques and Tools for End-User Sonification Design and Audio Personalization" on Monday, December 5th, 2016 at 10am CS 302.

[Nicki Gotsis]

Katie Anna Wolf will present her Pre-FPO on Monday, December 5th, 2016 at 10am CS 302.  

The members of her committee are as follows:
Examiners: Rebecca Fiebrink (advisor); Dan Truman (Music), and Marshini Chetty.
Readers: Adam Finkelstein and Mike Nees (Lafayette College) 

Everyone is invited to attend her talk.  The talk title and abstract follow below:

Title: Techniques and Tools for End-User Sonification Design and Audio Personalization 

Abstract: 
Modern daily life involves consuming increasing amounts of data from personalized applications and devices such as Twitter, the stock market and health trackers. As the amount and types of data increase, we need to continue to develop technology that presents the information in such a way that its meaning can be interpreted not only by scientists but by everyday people. Sonification, as a sister to visualization, is a way of representing data with sound. Due to physical impairments, high-dimensional data that is hard to visualize, or just a general desire to avoid staring at a screen, audio interfaces have been developed to take advantage of the communicative power of sound. However designing sonifications requires understanding of how the end users will use the system as well as knowledge in many domains including sound design, sonification design, and programming. 

In this talk I will present methods that give users who are non-experts in sound and sonification design the ability to customize their own sonifications using a graphical user interface. These methods include: (1) the analysis and modeling of environmental soundscapes (including animal vocalizations and sounds of the weather) which allow non-experts to talk about sounds in terms they know, (2) using related work by sonification experts and my own exploration of environmental sounds to design an automatic mapping technique that determines how the data should be represented by sounds, and (3) using an example-based approach that allows users to select example sound sets as an exemplar for how the sonification should sound. I will also discuss my ongoing work in developing tools that allow end users to control and personalize their auditory environment. Finally I will present a survey about people’s experience with audio personalization, and how the results may influence the design of tools that put the end user at the center of the sonification design process.