Can't You Hear Me?: Investigating Personal Soundscape Curation

Continuous advances in personal audio technology (e.g. headphones), led to efficient noise cancellation and allowed users to build and influence their personal acoustic environment. Despite the high adoption and ubiquitous character of the technology, we do not fully understand which particular factors influence and form usage patterns. As a step towards understanding the usage of personal audio technology, we conducted two focus groups (n=10) to investigate current headphone usage and users' wishes regarding current and future personal audio technology. Based on this data, we derive a model for what we call personal soundscape curation. This model was assessed with the data of a crowdsourced survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=194) on state of the art practices. Personal soundscape curation allows to describe usage strategies (curation, adaptation, renunciation) and break down influencing factors of context and environment as well as illustrate which consequences may arise from the users' behavior.

[1]  Claus-Peter H. Ernst,et al.  How Design Influences Headphone Usage , 2016 .

[2]  Andreas Butz,et al.  Seamless user notification in ambient soundscapes , 2005, IUI.

[3]  José A. Gallud,et al.  Smartphone Notifications: A Study on the Sound to Soundless Tendency , 2015, MobileHCI Adjunct.

[4]  E. Hall,et al.  Proxemics [and Comments and Replies] , 1968, Current Anthropology.

[5]  M. Southworth.  The Sonic Environment of Cities , 1969 .

[6]  P. Milgram,et al.  A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays , 1994 .

[7]  Sara Bly,et al.  Presenting information in sound , 1982, CHI '82.

[8]  Helena Jahncke,et al.  Office noise: Can headphones and masking sound attenuate distraction by background speech? , 2016, Work.

[9]  Joseph A. Paradiso,et al.  HearThere: Networked Sensory Prosthetics Through Auditory Augmented Reality , 2016, AH.

[10]  Jérôme Hansen,et al.  Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience , 2008 .

[11]  Richard Lichenstein,et al.  Headphone use and pedestrian injury and death in the United States: 2004–2011 , 2012, Injury Prevention.

[12]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk , 2008, CHI.

[13]  Daniel C. McFarlane,et al.  Coordinating the Interruption of People in Human-Computer Interaction , 1999, INTERACT.

[14]  Yangwon Lim,et al.  Architecture of Automatic Warning System on Urgent Traffic situation for Headphone Users , 2012 .

[15]  Vinaya Manchaiah,et al.  Daily music exposure dose and hearing problems using personal listening devices in adolescents and young adults: A systematic review , 2016, International journal of audiology.

[16]  Michael Bull,et al.  Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience , 2008 .

[17]  Robert Morrison Crane,et al.  Social distance and loneliness as they relate to headphones used with portable audio technology , 2005 .

[18]  Esko Keskinen,et al.  Effects of Five Speech Masking Sounds on Performance and Acoustic Satisfaction. Implications for Open-Plan Offices , 2011 .

[19]  Fan-Gang Zeng.  Goodbye Google Glass, Hello Smart Earphones , 2016 .

[20]  Roel Vertegaal,et al.  Attentive Headphones: Augmenting Conversational Attention with a Real World TiVo ® , 2005 .

[21]  Anna L. Cox,et al.  Using Nature-based Soundscapes to Support Task Performance and Mood , 2017, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[22]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers , 2010, CHI.

[23]  A. Strauss,et al.  Grounded theory , 2017 .

[24]  Ben P. Milner,et al.  Acoustic environment classification , 2006, TSLP.

[25]  Mack Hagood,et al.  Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space , 2011, American quarterly.

[26]  Ken Vassie,et al.  Effect of self-adjustable masking noise on open-plan office worker’s concentration, task performance and attitudes , 2017 .

[27]  Katherine Kenna,et al.  Superhearo: sensory augmentation for your friendly neighborhood vigilante , 2016, UbiComp Adjunct.

[28]  Janet Mancini Billson,et al.  Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research , 1989 .

[29]  Robert W. Lindeman,et al.  Hear-Through and Mic-Through Augmented Reality: Using Bone Conduction to Display Spatialized Audio , 2007, 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[30]  Paul Lukowicz,et al.  Wearable ambient sound display: embedding information in personal music , 2016, SEMWEB.

[31]  Jason Stanyek,et al.  The Oxford handbook of mobile music studies , 2014 .

[32]  Jeroen Strijbos,et al.  Sounds in Your Pocket: Composing Live Soundscapes with an App , 2013, Leonardo Music Journal.

[33]  Christine R. Yano.  Sounding Out The City: Personal Stereos and The Management of Everyday Life; Music in Everyday Life:Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life.;Music in Everyday Life. , 2001 .

[34]  M. Bull.  Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life , 2000 .

[35]  Eamonn O'Neill,et al.  Mobile service audio notifications: intuitive semantics and noises , 2008, OZCHI.