The Sound Manifesto

TL;DR

The paper advocates for a comprehensive research focus on sound as a versatile, rich information channel in computing, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts to develop advanced modeling and manipulation tools akin to graphics.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of sound as a general-purpose information channel and calls for a unified research approach integrating multiple disciplines.

Findings

Current audio rendering is high quality but lacks flexible modeling tools.

Sound as an information channel is underdeveloped compared to visual modalities.

A new central research topic is needed to advance digital audio capabilities.

Abstract

Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent audio rendering through D-A conversion, but we lack rich general facilities for modeling and manipulating sound comparable in quality and flexibility to graphics. We need co-ordinated research in several disciplines to improve the use of sound as an interactive information channel. Incremental and separate improvements in synthesis, analysis, speech processing, audiology, acoustics, music, etc. will not alone produce the radical progress that we seek in sonic practice. We also need to create a new central topic of study in digital audio research. The new topic will assimilate the contributions of different disciplines on a common foundation. The key central concept that we lack is sound as a general-purpose information channel. We must investigate the structure of this information channel, which is driven by the co-operative development of auditory perception and physical sound production. Particular audible encodings, such as speech and music, illuminate sonic information by example, but they are no more sufficient for a characterization than typography is sufficient for a characterization of visual information.