Background
Auditory display is an awkward term that juxtaposes the auditory with the visual. The term was coined in the 1950’s by Irwin Pollack and Lawrence Ficks in their experiments with audio as a substitute for visual displays in aircraft cockpits. These experiments were motivated by the aim to reduce pilot errors caused by visual overload due to the increasing number of cockpit instruments (Pollack and Ficks 1952). The term auditory display was transferred to computers in the 1980’s by researchers in HCI exploring the potential for auditory interfaces to enable visually impaired users to access word processing, spreadsheets and other applications. HCI researchers also coined the term sonification to mirror visualization and refer to the auditory rather than visual representation of digital data (Buxton 1989; Rabenhorst, Farrell, Jameson, Linton and Mandelman 1990). In 1992 Gregory Kramer organized a workshop on auditory display that was attended by 20 researchers, mainly from the psychometric and computer sciences, who established the scientific foundations of the field (Kramer 1994). Two years later the number of attendees tripled, and the workshop drew a “startlingly broad” range of disciplines which posed a challenge in the area of integrating research from specialists and generalists (Kramer 1996). In the foreword to the 1996 conference proceedings, Gregory Kramer describes the maturation of the field with core research components of science, technology, applications, and design. He observes that while ICAD '92 and '94 had more science-oriented papers focused on theory building, ICAD '96 provided a stronger showing on the design front, with funding from Microsoft pointing to viable commercial applications (Kramer 1996).