Between Place and Interface: Designing Situated Sound for the iPhone

This article explores composition skills and modalities for locative, multimedia texts by reporting experiences from a locative iPhone application that plays church music and explains that music's history in churches in Rome, Italy. Using a research by design approach, we did three rounds of observation, paper sketches, and user testing of prototypes. We found that an effective locative text must be adapted to the place in which it is intended to be experienced. The locative text must be specific, possibly referring to what the audience can see or experience at the place, and thus it is important to know how people usually behave in that particular place. Images are of little relevance in a mobile guide, except for exterior shots, which may help users to locate interesting buildings. Sound is more effective than visual modes as it allows the audience to look around while listening. For the same reason, the user interface in mobile, locative applications need to be even easier to use than in other services as they invite the audience to move through space while interacting with the application.