Creating Meaningful Melodies from Text Messages
Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Stefan Legien, Albrecht Schmidt, Julian Mennenöh · 2010
Writing text messages (e.g. email, SMS, instant messaging) is a popular form of synchronous and asynchronous communica-tion. However, when it comes to notifying users about new messages, current audio-based approaches, such as notification tones, are very limited in conveying information. In this paper we show how entire text messages can be encoded into a mean-ingful and euphonic melody in such a way that users can guess a message’s intention without actually seeing the content. First, as a proof of concept, we report on the findings of an initial on-line survey among 37 musicians and 32 non-musicians evaluat-ing the feasibility and validity of our approach. We show that our representation is understandable and that there are no sig-nificant differences between musicians and non-musicians. Second, we evaluated the approach in a real world scenario based on a Skype plug-in. In a field study with 14 participants we showed that sonified text messages strongly impact on the users ’ message checking behavior by significantly reducing the time between receiving and reading an incoming message.