Use of Multimedia Information in Library Navigation.

The software platform must support a variety of modalities and strategies for organizing, classifying, and retrieving sounds within the collection. The ability to audition sounds in real time as part of active library browsing will be crucial to the tool's long-term success as an intuitive aid. We will investigate where names, categories, and unorthodox linguistic strategies can help structure the sound model, and where auditory information itself can provide feedback to the navigation process.

In exploring this set of capabilities for the sound library, we will also be considering the role that auditory cues can play in the general task of navigating large and conceptually complex information bases. Since humans process information differently in auditory, visual, and other sensory modes, we may find that sound can be an important facet of any intuitive, instrument-like, ``playable'' interface to a large library. At the same time, musicians often use imagery drawn from other sensory modes—not only visual terms (e.g., color associations) but terms invoking taste, smell and temperature. It may be that intuitive, ``instrumental'' access to any collection structured with reference to a given sensory mode relies on synaesthetic ``mappings'' to other sensory modes. If this thesis is substantiated, we envision linkage to further domain analysis experiments in other multimedia domains, simultaneously exploring the organization of multimedia in libraries and its role in library interfaces.