An Investigation of Using Music to Provide Navigation Cues

This paper describes an experiment that investigates new principles for representing hierarchical menus such as telephone-based interface menus, with non-speech audio. A hierarchy of 25 nodes with a sound for each node was used. The sounds were designed to test the efficiency of using specific features of a musical language to provide navigation cues. Participants (half musicians and half non-musicians) were asked to identify the position of the sounds in the hierarchy. The overall recall rate of 86% suggests that syntactic features of a musical language of representation can be used as meaningful navigation cues. More generally, these results show that the specific meaning of musical motives can be used to provide ways to navigate in a hierarchical structure such as telephone-based interfaces menus.