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Bastian Pfleging, Florian Alt, Albrecht Schmidt
Meaningful Melodies - Personal Sonification of Text Messages for Mobile Devices
In MobileHCI '12: Adjunct Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGCHI's International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. San Francisco, CA, USA, September 21-24, 2012. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 189-192. ISBN 978-1-4503-1443-5. (bib)

Mobile phones offer great potential for personalization. Besides apps and background images, ringtones are the major form of personalization. They are most often used to have a personal sound for incoming texts and calls. Furthermore, ringtones are used to identify the caller or sender of a message. In parts, this function is utilitarian (e.g., caller identification without looking at the phone) but it is also a form of self-expression (e.g., favorite tune as standard ringtone). We investigate how audio can be used to convey richer information. In this demo we show how sonifications of SMS can be used to encode information about the sender's identity as well as the content and intention of a message based on exible, user-generated mappings. We present a platform that allows arbitrary mappings to be managed and apps to be connected in order to create a sonification of any message. Using a background app on Android, we show the utility of the approach for mobile devices.