Musicons
Musicons are an audio notification type created from extremely brief samples of well-known music. The number of audio messages that are required to be communicated between the computer and the user has increased. Applications such as calendars, social networking tools, instant messengers or SMS and telephony services, on both mobile and static computing devices, may need to present sporadic notifications and alerts to the user.
Reminder and notification systems are important for providing memory aids for people with cognitive impairments and supporting independent living for older adults. However, audio notifications are subject to a trade-off between ease of comprehension and confidentiality: as sounds become easier to learn they often become less confidential, and vice versa. Subsequently, it is desirable to use sounds that can balance this tradeoff effectively.
Real music is a useful medium in this context as it allows a designer to harness exiting associations and emotive memories a user may have with certain pieces of music in order to create reminders and notifications that are personal, potentially more memorable and easier to learn. Furthermore, familiar pieces of music can be recognised from samples as short as 0.2 seconds in length. Therefore Musicons created from music that is well known to the user can be made extremely short which can help increase confidentiality.
Researchers
Ross McLachlan (Summer Student)
Ross graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MSci in Software Engineering and was involved with the MultiMemoHome project as a summer student during his undergraduate studies. During this time he carried out work investigating the use of Musicons as a reminder modality and then continued to investigate this topic in his Master's Thesis. In his spare time, Ross likes to make music and read books about space.
Dr Marilyn McGee-Lennon (Researcher Co-Investigator)
Marilyn is a senior research fellow with a BSc in psychology and a PhD in computer science. Marilyn has over 10 years of teaching and research experience in the field of HCI. Her expertise includes multimodal interaction and user-centred design & evaluation. Marilyn specialises in health care and home care systems, and was recently a Research Fellow on the MATCH project, conducting user-based studies of home care technology and designing multimodal interfaces suitable for home care. She is one of the most experienced researchers in user-centred multimodal interaction in the UK, and one of few with any knowledge of multimodal design for home care settings. Marilyn lives in Glasgow with her husband Peter and enjoys live music, playing netball, watching football, and Las Vegas.
Publications
