Project

SoundSignaling

IA

Groups

Drawing inspiration from the notion of cognitive incongruence associated with Stroop's famous experiment, from musical principles, and from the observation that music consumption on an individual basis is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, we present the SoundSignaling system—a software platform designed to make real-time, stylistically relevant modifications to a personal corpus of music as a means of conveying information or notifications. From the substantial body of HCI research demonstrating the negative attentional implications of a daily inundation of notifications, we highlight two challenges associated with standard audio notifications—a "switch cost" that impedes productivity, and a lack of awareness of a user's cognitive load—that have the potential to be addressed by such a system without active activity estimation. Through this work, we suggest a re-evaluation of the age-old paradigm of binary notifications in favor of a system designed to operate upon the relatively unexplored medium of a user's musical preferences.