Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper addresses the issue of music as a communication medium in auditory humancomputer
interfaces. So far, psychoacoustics has had a great influence on the
development of auditory interfaces, directly and through music cognition. We suggest
that a better understanding of the processes involved in the perception of actual musical
excerpts should allow musical auditory interface designers to exploit the communicative
potential of music. In this respect, we argue that the real advantage of music as a
communication medium relies on the richness of its specifically musical meanings rather
than on its formal structure. Finally, we propose a method for automating the design of
musical auditory interfaces, in order to make this design possible to non-musician
designers.