Focus-plus-context audio interaction design

Abstract

We present an audio browsing and editing paradigm that incorporates the "focus plus context" visual interaction metaphor. A traditional waveform is displayed in full, and an area of focus is dynamically re-calculated to provide maximum detail in-focus and minimum detail in-context. The interaction metaphor also simultaneously re-scales a frequency-domain display, with increased detail available in both time and frequency domains by means of sub-sampling and window overlap. Various methods for selecting focus, identifying focus, and transitioning between the focus and context display areas are presented, and advantages for typical audio interaction applications are discussed. A collection of these ideas has been implemented within an open-source audio editing environment, and a discussion of this implementation and the related issues is presented. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.