Chained to the Hooter
Posted: January 28th, 2009 | Filed under: Mobilities at the Interface |
Console use affects an individual’s potential for mobility through coaxing one’s body into particular habits of sensing and reaction. The patterns that quickly feel “normal” for habitual computer users/operators not only bind one to the station, but become a reference point for one’s use of the senses when away from the station. (Drive over 12 hours straight and the absent or present vibrations of your destination site will make you walk and move differently.)
When looking at how this works in computing and console use, it’s easy to identify the visual feedback mechanisms, the ways in which machine displays code events into particular state changes (light turns red, text turns bold, icon starts bouncing) which trigger particular bodily responses. For many reasons however, it’s hard to identify the aural cues, the ways in which we form habits of sensation and action based on what we hear at the machine.
|
So the short history sound in computing in the recent issue of Jonathan Grudin’s Interactions journal is extremely helpful. We learn about earcons, sonification, Apple’s 1980’s SonicFinder, and even the function of sound in the first computers. Robare and Forlizzi write:
Many of the earliest computers were equipped with a speaker (known as a “hooter”) that could sonify the machine’s operations. The hooters were wired directly into a mainframe’s accumulator (or other likely spot); they produced rhythmic noises that engineers and operators could passively monitor. In the event of a bug, the noises would change. the interaction paradigm used was thus quite similar to that of a car engine: The user passively monitors a steady-state noise for any change in sound that might signal malfunction.
Also helpful is their reproduction of this 1970’s-era guide to designing sonic feedback:
I hope to later look up the proceedings of the annual International Conference on Auditory Display, and the work of Sarah Bly, who in the 1980’s imagined “how sound might help users find patterns in data that contained too many variables to be accurately displayed with a purely visual interface.”
If the article were mine, I’d end with some thoughts on how MP3’s have come to function as a sonic interface, how they structure the emotional and biological rhythms of users in response to particular computing events. Marketers of digital music and music players seem to imagine songs as background status indicators - we respond to a change more than to the sound content itself, ready to act appropriately on that change.
Postscript:
Upon finishing this post I headed outside to start clearing the night’s snow accumulation from my sidewalks and drive. I’d barely made a few loud scrapes of the shovel before a guy found me to see if I’d pay him to help. (I remembered him from last year, but never learned his name - just the sound of his regular cough.) I imagine him finding me by sound, walking the neighborhood in search of the sound of scraping against the morning’s snow-muffled quiet.
Leave a Reply