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Using the audio of 8-bit video games to monitor web marketing campaigns

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Abstract

Monitoring the performance of a web marketing campaign is usually a long-lasting, low-effort but distracting task, where a user repeatedly glances at some sort of visual analytics tools to check whether the campaign is going well. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach for this task, where the performance of a web marketing campaign is monitored through sonification, using the soundset of popular 8-bit arcade video games. On one hand, sonification would allow a user to be constantly informed about the current state of the campaign without being distracted. On the other hand, the sound metaphors coming from popular 8-bit arcade video games would be able to convey information about the status of the campaign in a simple and effective way (i.e., if the sonification of a campaign resembles the audio of a successful game session, then the campaign is going well). We investigated this idea by developing a prototype system for the sonification of the behavior of a web server activity through a configurable set of sound metaphors. We then analyzed the effectiveness of our approach by conducting a simple experimental study. This was done, first, by sonifying the progress of a given web marketing campaign using the soundset of two popular 8-bit video games: Super Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble. The outcoming soundtrack was then used in a controlled setting to assess the performance of a group of 20 participants listening to our soundtrack under different work conditions.

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Notes

  1. A prototype copy of our system is publicly available at the URL: http://www.statistica.uniroma1.it/users/uferraro/experim/sonification/.

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Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges Vittorio Scarano for his support and the enlightening discussions about the topic of this paper. Moreover, the author also thanks Luca Tardella for his nice collaboration in the statistical analysis of the results of the experiment presented in this paper. Finally, the author would like to thank the participants of our experiment for their time and their commitment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy

    Umberto Ferraro-Petrillo

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  1. Umberto Ferraro-Petrillo
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Correspondence to Umberto Ferraro-Petrillo.

Additional information

Communicated by S. Kopf.

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Supplementary material 2 (mp3 6564 KB)

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Ferraro-Petrillo, U. Using the audio of 8-bit video games to monitor web marketing campaigns. Multimedia Systems 23, 469–484 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-016-0509-6

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