NotiFall: Ambient Sonification System Using Water

2016. Alex Harman, Hristo Dimitrov, Ruisha Ma, Sam Whitehouse, Yiu Li, Paul Worgan, Themis Omirou & Anne Roudaut
Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

This paper presents NotiFall, an experimental prototype of an ambient auditory notification system. NotiFall uses the sound of falling water to subtly notify users for non-urgent matters, such as weather alerts or emails in an unobtrusive manner. These sounds are controlled and altered in order to convey a wider range of auditory cues and information. Traditionally, ambient notification systems are application specific and are limited in the way they can transmit information. In comparison, NotiFall is easily programmable, suitable for a wide range of home and work environments, and makes use of both visual and audio cues in order to impart information.

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Citation

Harman, A., Dimitrov, H., Ma, R., Whitehouse, S., Li, Y., Worgan, P., … Roudaut, A. (2016). Notifall: ambient sonification system using water. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2667–2672). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892443, doi:10.1145/2851581.2892443

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/2851581.2892443,
author = {Harman, Alex and Dimitrov, Hristo and Ma, Ruisha and Whitehouse, Sam and Li, Yiu and Worgan, Paul and Omirou, Themis and Roudaut, Anne},
title = {NotiFall: Ambient Sonification System Using Water},
year = {2016},
isbn = {9781450340823},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892443},
doi = {10.1145/2851581.2892443},
abstract = {This paper presents NotiFall, an experimental prototype of an ambient auditory notification system. NotiFall uses the sound of falling water to subtly notify users for non-urgent matters, such as weather alerts or emails in an unobtrusive manner. These sounds are controlled and altered in order to convey a wider range of auditory cues and information. Traditionally, ambient notification systems are application specific and are limited in the way they can transmit information. In comparison, NotiFall is easily programmable, suitable for a wide range of home and work environments, and makes use of both visual and audio cues in order to impart information.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {2667–2672},
numpages = {6},
keywords = {water, sounds, auditory, ambient notifications},
location = {San Jose, California, USA},
series = {CHI EA '16}
}