Sound and Sonification Design for Interactive Learning Tools

What sounds do we hear every day? What sounds do we hear when we use technology? And, how do we rely on them to inform our decisions throughout the day? We’ll cover categories of sound types and terminology.

Module 2 introduces specific mappings and sound characteristics that we can rely on to convey information. We’ll introduce terminology for simple mappings like pitch, timbre, reverberation, and many more. Then we’ll move on to more complex audio mappings, and design considerations for layering sounds in interactive learning tools.

For sound designs, it’s important to understand how your users are interpreting and thinking about the mappings. This module will cover the measurements and question types to consider for evaluation, the different types of evaluations, and how to analyze the data generated in the process. Then, we’ll discuss how to make changes to a sound design using what we learned from evaluations.

Module 4 will introduce different prototyping and design methods for making sounds. We’ll go through a variety of tools that you can use to make sounds, and where to find other sounds you might want to use. We’ll introduce some programmatic ways of creating sounds and discuss how to embed the sounds into prototypes.