Examining the learnability of auditory displays: Music, earcons, spearcons, and lyricons

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Date
2018-06Author
Tislar, Kay
Duford, Zackery
Nelson, Brittany
Peabody, Madeline
Jeon, Myounghoon
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Show full item recordAbstract
Auditory displays are a useful platform to convey information
to users for a variety of reasons. The present study sought to
examine the use of different types of sounds that can be used
in auditory displays—music, earcons, spearcons, and
lyricons—to determine which sounds have the highest
learnability when presented in sequences. Participants were
self-trained on sound meanings and then asked to recall
meanings after listening to sequences of varying lengths. The
relatedness of sounds and their attributed meanings, or the
intuitiveness of the sounds, was also examined. The results
show that participants were able to learn and recall lyricons
and spearcons the best, and related meaning is an important
contributing variable to learnability and memorability of all
sound types. This should open the door for future research
and experimentation of lyricons and spearcons presented in
auditory streams.