Sound feedback for the optimization of performance in running

Recently, auditory display has become quite popular together with visualization in order to present data or send feedback in different contexts. Psychological studies have concluded that it is really intuitive for the human brain to react to sounds, therefore, the concept of sonification has started to be used in sports and other activities that require a good body coordination and technique. There has also been previous work with sonification in a wide variety of fields, such as: physical exercise, games, and physiotherapy. At KTH we have been recently applying sonification in a couple of projects. In one project we used sonification for improving runner’s technique by analyzing the vertical displacement of the runner with a smartphone’s accelerometer [4]. Another project was about the improvement of performance in rowing [2,3]. Different sensors were placed in the boat and the oars in order to compute different information like the horizontal acceleration and displacement and send audio feedback to the rowers in order to improve their technique. In another study Barrass and colleagues [1] studied the preferences by casual runners for different types of audio feedback. This was achieved by asking runners to carry a probe logging their preferences among six sonification models. In another study, music was used in three types of sonification of the degree of motoric synchronization in active music listening [8] . The interesting contribution of this study was that the sonification itself was music that changed in different ways depending on how coordinated the movements were.