Towards one-pixel-displays for sound information visualization

Deaf people or people with a situational auditory disability (e.g. wearing headphones) have limited access to surrounding sounds, such as fire alarms or people approaching them from behind. Prior work has applied sensory substitution to provide information about sound presence, type and direction to deaf people. However, there are many ways to present sound information through an alternative modality. In this paper, we investigated whether a relationship between light behaviour and sound types exists for one-pixel-displays among deaf and hearing persons. We found the Staircase Blink pattern to be strongly preferred for Alarm Sounds and the Blink Slow pattern for Notification Sounds. We believe that the preliminary findings of our work will inform future design of one-pixel-displays for sound information visualization.