Comparing Sonification Strategies Applied to Musical and Non-Musical Signals for Auditory Guidance Purposes

Researchers have increasingly explored the potential of interactive auditory guidance in tasks such as navigation and spatial orientation. Despite laboratory promise, the adoption of these applications in real-life remains limited, partly due the lack of aesthetic considerations in the design of auditory guidance stimuli, leading to auditory fatigue and low user acceptance. Although music has been suggested as a solution and tested more extensively in motor learning and rehabilitation, there is a lack of empirical research comparing its guidance efficacy with traditional nonmusical designs. Through a one-dimensional guidance task with 18 participants, the present study compared an array of novel musical strategies with nonmusical strategies based on the same auditory perceptual dimensions. It was observed that the musical strategies elicited higher user experience ratings while affording a comparable level of performance (error, acquisition time, overshoots) to the nonmusical strategies. There were also performance differences based on the auditory dimensions manipulated by the strategies (e.g. pitch, loudness). This study provides preliminary evidence that music warrants more serious consideration as a means to address the present issues of aesthetics and user preference in auditory guidance.