Comparing Sonification Strategies Applied to Musical and Non-Musical Signals for Auditory Guidance Purposes

Researchers have increasingly explored the potential of interactive auditory guidance in navigation and spatial orientation tasks. Despite laboratory promise, the adoption of these applications in real-life remains limited, partly due to
the lack of aesthetic considerations in the design of auditory guidance stimuli, leading to auditory fatigue and low user acceptance. Although music has been suggested as a solution and tested in motor learning and rehabilitation, there is a lack of empirical research comparing its guidance efficacy with traditional nonmusical designs. Through a one-dimensional guidance task with 18 participants, the present study compared an array of novel musical strate-
gies with nonmusical strategies based on the same auditory perceptual dimensions. It was observed that the musical strategies elicited higher user experience ratings while affording comparable performance (error, acquisition time, overshoots) to the nonmusical strategies. There were also performance differences based on the auditory dimensions manipulated by the strategies (e.g. pitch, loudness). There is thus preliminary evidence that music warrants more serious consideration as a means to address the issues of pleasantness and user preference in auditory guidance.