AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE IDENTIFICATION OF CONCURRENTLY PRESENTED EARCONS

In this paper we describe an experiment investigating the ability of participants to identify multiple, concurrently playing structured sounds, called earcons. Several different sets of earcons were compared, one “state of the art” set based on the guidelines of Brewster [1], and other sets of earcons modified to take account of auditory scene analysis principles. The effect of the number of concurrently playing earcons on identification was also investigated, with instances of 1, 2, 3 and 4 concurrently playing earcons tested. Overall, performance was low, with less than two earcons being successfully identified in any condition. However it was found that both staggering the onset times of each earcon, as well as presenting each earcon with a unique timbre, had a significantly positive effect on identification.