The quest for auditory direct manipulation: The sonified Towers of Hanoi                                       

Fredrik Winberg       and Sten Olof Hellstrm                                                   
Centre for User Oriented IT-Design, Royal Institute of Technology,                                    
Lindstedtsvgen 5, SE-10044 Stockholm, SWEDEN                                                   
Department of Music, City University,                                                   
London EC1V 0HB, UK                                                               
fredrikw@nada.kth.se,   soh@nada.kth.se                                                   


ABSTRACT                                                                
This paper presents a study of an auditory version of the game Towers of Hanoi. The goal of this study was to investigate 
the nature of continuos presentation and what this could mean when implementing auditory direct manipulation.                
We also wanted to find out if it was possible to make an auditory interface that met the requirements of a direct manipulation 
interface. The results showed that it was indeed possible to implement auditory direct manipulation, but 
using Towers of Hanoi as the underlying model restricted the possibilities of scaling the auditory space. The results also          
showed that having a limited set of objects, the nature of continuos presentation was not as important as how to interact         
with the auditory space.                                                                                                          



REFERENCES 
Ball, W. W. R. (1939). Mathematical recreations & essays (11th ed.) (pp. 303-305). London: Macmillan & Co.
Blattner, M., Sumikawa, D., & Greenberg, R. (1989). Earcons and Icons: Their Structure and Common Design
   Principles. Human-Computer Interaction, 4(1), 11-44.
Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory scene analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gaver, W. W. (1994). Using and Creating Auditory Icons. In G. Kramer (Ed.), Auditory display: Sonification,
   audification, and auditory interfaces (pp. 417-446). Reading, USA: Addison-Wesley.
Gaver, W.W., Smith, R.B., & OShea, T. (1991). Effective sounds in complex systems: The ARKola simulation. In
   Proceedings of CHI91 (pp. 85-90). New York: ACM.
GUIB Consortium. (1995). Final Report of the GUIB Project: Textual and Graphical Interfaces for Blind People.
   London: Royal National Institute for the Blind.
Hutchins, E. L., Hollan, J. D., & Norman, D. A. (1985). Direct manipulation interfaces. In D. A. Norman & S. W.
   Draper (Eds.), User centered system design (pp. 87-124). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Kramer, G. (1994). Some Organizing Principles for Representing Data with Sound. In G. Kramer (Ed.), Auditory
   display: Sonification, audification, and auditory interfaces (pp. 185-221). Reading, USA: Addison-Wesley.
Mynatt, E. D. (1997). Transforming graphical interfaces into auditory interfaces for blind users. Human-Computer
   Interaction, 12, 7-45.
Saue, S. (2000). A model for interaction in exploratory sonification displays. In Proceedings of ICAD 2000 [online
   proceedings]. URL http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2000/ICAD2000.html (visited 2000, July
   11).
Walker, B.N., Kramer, G., & Lane, D.M. (2000). Psychophysical Scaling of Sonification Mappings. In Proceedings of
   ICAD 2000 [online proceedings]. URL http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2000/ICAD2000.html
   (visited 2000, July 11).
Winberg, F. & Hellstr m, S. O. (2000). Investigating Auditory Direct Manipulation: Sonifying the Towers of Hanoi. In
   CHI 2000 Extended Abstracts (pp. 281-282). New York: ACM.