Day 2 of ICAD 2019 was sadly my last as I was due to speak somewhere else. It developed Day 1 quite nicely.
The opening talk on using sonification in graphs was a well thought out consideration of the role of sound to learn how a network graph might be considered aurally. Whilst it reminds me of the mid 2000s work on graphs, it is a paper to be revisited in some future work. The talk on auditory contrast enhancement looked at the ways that the sound could be altered to derive new audio enhancements. There is a constraint on the enhancement and its plausability of the result. The Soccer Sonification was the most entertaining of them (and the speaker had a Newcastle Utd shirt on) which explored the design space of a live action game and mentioned the BUZZ scale. This scale could be used in the quantitative analysis of auditory User Experience so is one that has underpinned some recent explorations. Nick Collins looked at maths into music, focussing on one function in particular. I suspect it is not his intention but I did find it useful to grasp a basic understanding of what the maths was doing.
Post lunch, we had the cyber-security awareness session. The first talk looked at the design of the sound to work in a complex environment, as did the third talk about threats to water systems. It was complemented by the following talk that described the issue of cognitive blindness in airplanes where an alarm was not heard due to the amount of distractions and tasks. The hidden web tracking sonification was interesting (and reprised looking at cookie trackers in the sonification concert). The work is being designed as an intervention to help a listener understand how they are being watched.
I didn’t make notes on the sonification concert but did enjoy it.
So what did I take away from ICAD? Apart from meeting people who I know through papers and so on? In part, I did get a greater appreciation of the community and some of the questions being asked. There are things to be tried, especially as I go back to the questions of design. I do want to try to BUZZ scale for my own testing as it does cover some of the areas where I have had concerns and think that we should try and build some sort of consensus rather than having various small overlapping projects that sort of do things but not entirely.
Hmmm. Ruminations may abound.
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