Designing Auditory Spaces to Support Sense of Place: The Role of Expectation

This paper reviews current approaches to designing virtual environments and investigates aspects of influence in designing auditory spaces to support novel forms of interaction in virtual places. Initial research on human imagined sounds from places has identified ‘expectation’ as an important psychological construct, which must be considered when designing sounds for virtual places. The research work continues to provide evidence that there are differences between sounds people expect to hear in places and sounds recorded in real life places. Instead of designing realistic virtual spaces, the paper suggests a user’s sense of presence as a measure of the user’s experience in virtual environment. The results indicate that using highly expected sounds increases users’ sense of presence. As such, it is to propose that designing auditory spaces using expectations as perceived affordance is perhaps a minimal way to design auditory spaces that support sense of place, hence provoke the emergence of virtual communities. Future work of the project is discussed.