Prosody-First Interaction Sound Design: A Framework Proposal

Interaction sound is generally specified as material — timbre, harmony, loudness, brand character — with its communicative meaning left tacit or treated as convention. This working paper proposes that interaction sound be specified first as prosodic contour, the shape a signal draws over time, with material choices following from it. The proposal draws on research into infant-directed speech, principally Anne Fernald's work on the prosodic contours that carry communicative intent, their recurrence across widely separated language communities, and their legibility to listeners with no exposure to the source language. Four design principles are derived from that literature, covering approval, prohibition, attention, and comfort signalling. The paper states explicitly which claims are established in the existing literature and which are the author's derived proposals, including a testable and as-yet-untested prediction that contour-encoded meaning is more robust to degraded playback conditions than timbre-encoded meaning. This is version 1, a working paper stating a framework position. An expanded version with a fuller literature review is in preparation and will be deposited under the same concept DOI.