audio

Exertion activities, such as jogging, require users to invest intense physical effort and are associated with physical and social health benefits. Despite the benefits, our understanding of exertion activities is limited, especially when it comes to social experiences. In order to begin understanding how to design for technologically augmented social exertion experiences, we present "Jogging over a Distance", a system in which spatialized audio based on heart rate allowed runners as far apart as Europe and Australia to run together. Our analysis revealed how certain aspects of the design facilitated a social experience, and consequently we describe a framework for designing augmented exertion activities. We make recommendations as to how designers could use this framework to aid the development of future social systems that aim to utilize the benefits of exertion.

In this paper we present a novel interface for selecting sounds in audio mixtures. Traditional interfaces in audio editors provide a graphical representation of sounds which is either a waveform, or some variation of a time/frequency transform. Although with these representations a user might be able to visually identify elements of sounds in a mixture, they do not facilitate object-specific editing (e.g. selecting only the voice of a singer in a song). This interface uses audio guidance from a user in order to select a target sound within a mixture. The user is asked to vocalize (or otherwise sonically represent) the desired target sound, and an automatic process identifies and isolates the elements of the mixture that best relate to the user's input. This way of pointing to specific parts of an audio stream allows a user to perform audio selections which would have been infeasible otherwise.