Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being
Michael Frishkopf, Scott Smallwood · IntechOpen eBooks · 2025
Augmented reality (AR) harbors an ocularcentric bias toward visual augmented reality (VAR), at the expense of auditory augmented reality (AAR). The latter is more readily available, technologically simpler and lower cost, with great potential for improving human well-being, what we call AAR for Well-being (AAR4W). In our chapter, we discuss the history of AR from this perspective, then present several AAR4W projects, each extending reality with acousmatic sound, as informed, in varying proportions, by disciplines of sound art, electroacoustic composition, ethnomusicology, and health sciences, including context, technical descriptions, experience, and future implications. Each is designed to enhance well-being using soundscapes, which we define as steady-state, nonperiodic sound, primarily admixtures of natural, musical, and synthetic sounds. Soundscapes offer enormous potential to alter mood and promote mental health, while remaining subliminal. Our projects are designed to support reflection, meditation, relaxation, and focus, with explicit intentions ranging among aesthetic priorities of sound artists, multicultural educational priorities of ethnomusicologists, and therapeutic priorities of health care providers. We consider soundscapes an ideal AR vehicle for well-being, as they naturally blend seamlessly with the real world, mixing harmoniously with each other, requiring minimal technological intervention or cost, and fading non-distractively into the perceptual background, unlike VAR presentation of visual information, which tends to be perceptually and cognitively disruptive.