Sonify - A Platform for the Sonification of Text Messages

Abstract

Sonification of text messages offers a great potential for personalization while at the same time allowing rich information to be mediated. For example, ringtones are the major form of personalization on smartphones besides apps and background images. Ringtones are often used as a form of self-expression by the smartphone owner (e.g., using ones favorite sound track as standard ringtone), but also to identify the caller or sender of a message (e.g., the user knows who is calling without taking the phone out of the pocket). We believe this approach to be applicable to a wide variety of text messages, such as SMS, email, or IM. In this paper, we first present a web-based platform that allows user-generated mappings for text sonification to be created and managed. An API that enables any application to send a text message and receive the sonification in the form of a MIDI file. To showcase the potential, we implemented an Android app that sonifies incoming SMS. Second, we evaluate the feasibility of our approach to sonify messages and show that sonified messages are equally effective as ringtones when conveying meta information.