Sonifications in the control room

Those whose work involves monitoring highly complex industrial procedues sometimes have difficulty attending to several concurrent processes (at the same time). To this end :

“Computer scientists at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interactive Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University and the University of Vienna have developed a method that allows control room staff to monitor several processes at the same time”

Their answer, in a word, is ‘sonification’. The scientists, whose paper ‘A Sonification System for Process Monitoring as Secondary Task’  is published in Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Conference on Cognitive Infocommunication,

provide a sonificated example of what it might be like to work in such a control room. [mp4 format] Further research is required though say the investigators :

“First pre-tests suggest that with the developed system, users are indeed able to infer states and the need to intervene, however, whether it improves performance over visual-only and simple auditory-warning based systems in a significant manner still has to be proven.”