Proceedings of the 9th Sound and Music Computing Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, 11-14 July, 2012 USE OF SOUNDSCAPES FOR PROVIDING INFORMATION ABOUT DISTANCE LEFT IN TRAIN JOURNEYS Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen and Roberto Bresin KTH Royal Institute of Technology {kjetil,roberto}@kth.se ABSTRACT This paper presents a study in the framework of the ISHT – Interior sound design of high-speed trains project. Du- ring a train journey between the cities of Stockholm and G¨ avle, Sweden, 9 travellers participated in a listening ex- periment to evaluate the use of sonification to convey non- speech based information about the travel. We tested soni- fication for communicating the distance between two sta- tions in the train journey. The participants could activate an iconographic representation of the sound in the landscape outside and listen to it through headphones in three condi- tions: with music, with a soundscape or with silence. Their interaction was logged, and ratings of their stated sense of knowing where the train was between the departure and ar- rival stations were recorded. Preliminary results show that our sonification helped participants to get an idea of the distance left for reaching the next station, and also that lis- tening to the sonification was experienced as an engaging and pleasant activity. 1. INTRODUCTION We present here a study that has been conducted in the framework of the ISHT – Interior sound design of high- speed trains project. 1 Main goal of the project is the deve- lopment of design methods and acoustic artefacts for im- proving the sound environment in high-speed railroad cars of the future, with particular focus on the passenger com- fort. The role of KTH in the project is the testing and design of new sound-based signaling methods for providing tra- vel information to passengers on the train. In the following sections we describe how we implemented and tested so- nification as one method for providing information to pas- sengers. Research focussing on the enhancement of travel experi- ence has seen an evolution in recent years, specially thanks to the availability of mobile devices that can provide infor- mation about the traveller’s position, for example through GPS technology. Public transport authorities are making 1 http://ishtkonstfack.blogspot.se/ Copyright: c 2012 Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen and Roberto Bresin . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. available information about their transport systems to de- velopers through APIs [1]. Researchers have been propo- sing new mobile phone-based applications for enhancing the travel experience from a social point of view, by for example developing chat systems that are meant for pe- ople sitting in the same bus, or information services that are location-based (for example a list of shops and inte- rest landmarks in the proximity of a bus stop) [1]. Some projects have made use of non-speech sounds for provi- ding route information for example by adopting auditory icons which describe modes of transportation and the du- ration of the journey [2]. In the work by Kainulainen and co-workers [2] the duration of the journey is compressed, each minute of travel is mapped to one second of sound in the auditory icon, e.g. a travel of 10 minutes will cor- respond to a 10 second sound. In the same study sound- marks have been used for guiding travellers, for example a soundscape could be used for signaling a location. While travellers familiar with the location will recognize the pla- ce by its recorded soundscape, this task could be difficult for people unfamiliar with the place and therefore a sym- bolic soundmark would work better. The latter is the appro- ach that we use in our study for designing the soundscape of the landscape outside the train during travel. In another interesting study Kostiainen and colleagues [3] made also use of sound for in a mobile journey planner application. Among other things they designed an interesting sonifica- tion of the time needed for a journey. From user tests it emerged that users could understand the this sonification only after they received instructions how to interpret the sonification. In our study we want to use soundscapes that provide the traveller with an immediate sense of distance and consequentially of time left to destination, without the need for instructions. Previous work in the field of sonification in train journey have been done by Pohle and colleagues [4]. They used the built-in camera of a mobile phone for filming the envi- ronment outside the window in passenger cars. The video was sonified in real-time generating a music composition that gives instantaneous information about the outside en- vironment. Therefore the application of sonification was designed more from an artistic point of view than a practi- cal one, while in our study we wanted to use sonification for providing the typically verbally announced information about the travel by using non-speech sounds. SM⒔2012-79