Interactions with sound parameters

Traditionally, visualization systems have focused on the visual sense. However, with the advent of multimedia and virtual reality systems, other senses such as sound and touch are being slowly incorporated into systems. Even in the visual channel, the majority of systems depend on the perception of geometry through graphical concepts such as lines, fillareas, windows, and raster pixmaps to provide the visualization feedback. Sound is being effectively used in visualization systems and is increasingly being integrated into mainstream systems. However, we have not made much progress in developing a fundamental understanding of interaction in non-geometric representational spaces. We are interested in extending simple interactions, such as zoom and pan, into other domains such as sound. Pitch is a perceptual quantity of sound that is associated with the physical quantity frequency. We describe how zoom and pan operations in pitch are supported. Formal definitions for these operations are also provided. Finally, we describe a prototype system for such interactions.