Audio Aura

The work "Audio Aura" is an ambient sonfication installation inside an office space. It is designed "to provide serendipitous information via background auditory cues, that is tied to people’s physical actions in the workplace"[1]. Metrics gathered through various sensors (e.g. infrared tracking of people inside the office) are being turned into an ambient soundscape to give workers inside that space a constant overview of what is going on inside the office space and the business.

Though "Audio Aura" focuses more on the actual physical office space, rather than internal business and process metrics, it still very closely related to the research and work for the "Listening to the Heart of Business" master project. A lot can be learned from the conducted research of the "Audio Aura" project and their results and take aways should be highly considered during the creation of prototypes.

The following three quotes have been particularly seen as important. Those learnings about sound design for such a particular system must not be ignored and have to be kept in mind while creating the intended soundscape that will be implemented inside the DataShaka office space:

"Because we intend this system for background interaction, the design of the auditory cues must avoid the “alarm” paradigm so frequently found in computational environments." [1]

"Another idea (...) is imbedding cues into a running, low-level soundtrack, so that the user is not startled by the sudden impingement of a sound. The running track  itself carries information about global levels of activity (...). This “group pulse” sound forms a bed within which other auditory information can  lie." [1]

"One useful aspect of the ecological approach to sound design is considering frequency bandwidth and human perception as limited resources." [1]

Furthermore, two interesting sources are mentioned that will be further investigated:

• I&ii, H. and Ullmer, B., (1997) “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits, and Atoms,” in Proceedings of CHl’97, ACM, March 1997.
• Weiser, M. (1991) The Computer of the 21st Century. Scientific American 265(3):94-104.

Sources:

D. Mynutt, E., Back, M.,, Want, R., Palo, X., Baer, M., B. Elli, J., "Designing Audio Aura", Alto Research Centre, University of Stanford, Gorgia Institute of Technology, 1998