Non-speech audio can be used in innovative ways to augment
conventional output devices such as a visual display. Today,
most desktop computers can produce at least telephone-quality
audio. Non-speech audio has been used for a long time on the
Apple platform to provide the user with audio cues for specific
events. This work has been formalized by the human-computer
interaction community by introducing the notion of earcons [Bux89][BGB88][Gav93][BG93][RK92][Ram89][BGP93][BCK<6244>>+93][JSBG86][SMG90]. A screen access
program (prototype) for Presentation Manager under OS2
demonstrated the effective use of such non-speech cues in
providing the user with spatial information -see [F.92] for details. A
similar approach is being used at Georgia Tech in developing
Mercator[+] [ME92], a screen access
program for the X-windows system. The use of non-speech audio
to display complex data sets has been investigated by the
scientific visualization community, where audio provides an
extra dimension (see [SB92][Bro91][Bro92][RK92][Ram89][BLJ86][BGK92] for several related
examples).