Writing text messages (e.g. email, SMS, instant messaging) is apopular form of synchronous and asynchronous communication.However, when it comes to notifying users about newmessages, current audio-based approaches, such as notificationtones, are very limited in conveying information. In this paperwe show how entire text messages can be encoded into a meaningfuland euphonic melody in such a way that users can guessa message’s intention without actually seeing the content. First; as a proof of concept, we report on the findings of an initial onlinesurvey among 37 musicians and 32 non-musicians evaluatingthe feasibility and validity of our approach. We show thatour representation is understandable and that there are no significantdifferences between musicians and non-musicians.Second, we evaluated the approach in a real world scenariobased on a Skype plug-in. In a field study with 14 participantswe showed that sonified text messages strongly impact on theusers’ message checking behavior by significantly reducing thetime between receiving and reading an incoming message.    «

Writing text messages (e.g. email, SMS, instant messaging) is apopular form of synchronous and asynchronous communication.However, when it comes to notifying users about newmessages, current audio-based approaches, such as notificationtones, are very limited in conveying information. In this paperwe show how entire text messages can be encoded into a meaningfuland euphonic melody in such a way that users can guessa message’s intention without actually seeing the content. First; as a proof of co...    »