Non-speech audio can be used in innovative ways to augment
conventional output devices such as a
visual display. Today, most desktop computers can produce
at least telephone-quality audio. Non-speech audio has been used for
a long time on the Apple platform to provide the user with audio cues
for specific events. This work has been formalized by the
human-computer interaction community by introducing the notion of
earcons [Bux89][BGB88][Gav93][BG93][RK92][Ram89][BGP93][BCK<6244>>+93][JSBG86][SMG90]. A screen access program
(prototype) for Presentation Manager under OS2 demonstrated the
effective use of such non-speech cues in providing the user with
spatial information -see [F.92] for details. A
similar approach is being used at Georgia Tech in developing
Mercator[+] [ME92],
a screen access program for the X-windows system. The use of
non-speech audio to display complex data sets has been investigated by
the scientific visualization community, where audio provides an extra
dimension
(see [SB92][Bro91][Bro92][RK92][Ram89][BLJ86][BGK92]
for several related examples).