Enriching Audio Support In A Hypermedia System

Description/Abstract

Many hypermedia systems support a wide variety of media such as text, video and pictures, but audio has been somewhat neglected. The central reason that audio has not attracted as much attention as other media is its obvious lack of visual identity. The visual nature of window-based applications, especially window-based hypermedia viewers, meant that the main focus of this work was to identify a meaningful representation of audio within a hypermedia context. This paper introduces the sound viewer and describes the associated concepts. The issues raised during development are also discussed in some depth. This viewer facilitates the creation and traversal of links to and from sound media. The audio media formats supported are WAV[1], CD[2] Audio and MIDI[3]. The resultant viewer provides a unified and extensible framework for interacting with audio media operating from within a open hypermedia environment. Microcosm is the product of research into open hypermedia systems conducted by a group within the department. Microcosm can be augmented to support additional media with minimal overhead. This is largely attributable to the open design of the system which is consequently an ideal experimentation vehicle for the sound viewer design.