Evaluating the Magnitude Estimation Approach for Designing Sonification Mapping Topologies
A challenge in sonification design is mapping data param-eters onto acoustic parameters in a way that aligns with a listener’s mental model of how a given data parameter should sound. Studies have used the psychophysical scaling method of magnitude estimation to systematically evaluate how participants per-ceive mappings between data and sound parameters - giving data on perceived polarity and scale of the relationship between the data and sound parameters. As of yet, there has been little re-search investigating whether data-to-sound mappings that are de-signed based on results from these magnitude estimation experiments have any effect on users’ performance in an applied audi-tory display task. This paper presents an experiment that com-pares data-to-sound mappings in which the mapping’s polarity is based on results from a previous magnitude estimation experiment against mappings whose polarities are inverted. The experiment is based around a simple task in which participants need to rank WiFi networks based on how secure they are, where security is represented using an auditory display. Results suggest that for a simple auditory display like the one used here, whether or not the polarities of the data-to-sound mappings are based on magnitude estimation does not have a substantial effect on any objective per-formance measures gathered during the experiment. Finally, potential areas for future work are discussed that may continue to investigate the problems addressed by this paper.