Peripheral Notification with Customized Embedded Audio Cues

Abstract

Peripheral notification services allow users to monitor information with less distraction of attendees in their surrounding. In the majority of cases, the information is provided by visual displays that often have several disadvantages, e.g. the lack of privacy or the user is locally bounded to the surrounding of the display. In this paper, we introduce an approach for a discreet notification of persons in multi-user environments. In particular, we use the current user position to provide a personalized and locationaware notification service with non-speech audio cues embedded in aesthetic background music. Thereby we enriched the music, and especially the notification audio cues, with functionality to influence the perception and to control the attention of the listeners. These functional pieces of music should stay in the peripheral background to avoid too much attention. The used ambient soundscapes and the set of corresponding notification instruments were composed and recorded by ourselves. The development process including compositional constraints with respect to auditive perception and emotional effects raised by music will also be introduced in this paper as well as the nomadic event notification service which includes our indoor positioning system for mobile devices.