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Abstract

The use of auditory feedback signals in multimedia communications devices was investigated internationally. Specifically, subjects in the United States, Singapore, India and Turkey evaluated musically based sound feedback. Subjects paired the sounds with communications functions. They also provided ratings of their confidence with the pairing, pleasantness of the sound, appropriateness of the sound for a business environment, and how well the group of sounds fit together as a family. Findings indicate that the reliability of mapping sounds to intended functions does not vary across countries. Functional mapping performance was uniformly low. The subjective ratings for the sounds overall indicated that, although all subjects rated the sounds above average, US subjects rate the sounds significantly higher than two of the three other countries included in the study. More detailed analysis of the differences isolated the variance to two function feedback sounds. It may be that the country differences found for these two musical feedback signals were attributed to cultural familiarity with the sound or the function.

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Sounds Good to Me: Global Investigation of Auditory Feedback

Abstract

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