An evaluation of earcons was carried out to see whether they are an effective means of communicating information in sound. An initial experiment showed that earcons were better than unstructured bursts of sound and that musical timbres were more effective than simple tones. A second experiment was then carried out which improved upon some of the weaknesses shown up in Experiment 1 to give a significant improvement in recognition. From the results of these experiments some guidelines were drawn

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... p for use in the creation of earcons. Earcons have been shown to be an effective method for communicating information in a human-computer interface. Providing information in an auditory form could generally help solve this problem and allow visually disabled users the same facilities as the sighted. This evaluation is part of a research project looking at the best ways to integrate audio and graphical interfaces. The research aims to find the areas in an interface where the use of sound will be most beneficial and also what types of sounds are the most effective for communicating information. One major question that must be answered when creating an auditory interface is: What sounds should be used? Brewster [2] outlines some of the different systems available. Gaver's auditory icons have been used in several systems, such as the SonicFinder [5], SharedARK [6] and ARKola [7]. These use environmental sounds that have a semantic link with the object they represent. They have been shown to be an effective form of presenting information in sound. One other important, and as yet untested, method of presenting auditory information is the system of earcons [1, 13, 14]. Earcons are abstract, synthetic tones that can be used in structured combinations to create sound messages to represent parts of an interface. Blattner et al. define earcons as "non-verbal audio messages that are used in the computer/user interface to provide information to the user about some computer object, operation or interaction". Earcons are composed of motives, which are short, rhythmic sequences of pitches with variable intensity, timbre and register.