To your left you hear the gentle "plink" of a drop of water. Ahead of you, a crow squawks. And to your right, you hear the subtle lilt of a flute. Something like this 3D soundscape could soon be alerting you, via your headphones, to updates on your social network and news feeds.
The software that provides it, called AudioFeeds, announces Facebook updates such as friend requests with watery sounds like drips, bubbles and splashes. Bird calls are reserved for Twitter, while musical sounds such as a didgeridoo or wind chime alert you to news stories.
It achieves the 3D effect by adjusting the phase, or timing, of the sounds delivered to your left and right earphones.
"The idea is to tell you what is going on in your social networks in a non-intrusive manner," says co-developer Stephen Brewster of the University of Glasgow, UK. "Rather than having to look at your phone all the time we have created a 3D sonification of social network and news feed alerts."
AudioFeeds could be built into a cellphone app, Brewster says. The technology will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia conference in Florence, Italy, next week.
