Supplementary Material for "Balancing Salience and Unobtrusiveness in Auditory Monitoring of Evolutionary Optimization"

This paper develops interactive sonification of evolutionary strategies (ES) for global optimization. We briefly describe the specific strengths of sonification as a tool for monitoring, the emerging trend of interactive sonification, and what it can add to the field of evolutionary computation. Then, we explain the algorithmic procedure of ES and discuss the need to intervene during optimization runs and the current shortcomings in appropriate user feedback. This motivates the development of an auditory closed-loop setup that brings the expertise of auditory augmentation to ES algorithms. We present the sound design and the detailed mapping of parameters from the ES to sound properties. Three different auditory display settings were developed: (i) informative detailed sounds percepts stretching over 0.5 seconds, (ii) short near real time augmentations and (iii) a mixed mode setting that switches between both alternatives based on interaction frequency through machine listening. Finally, we conducted a user study, in which the three implemented sonification types are tested by subjects and the users preference is evaluated through a questionnaire.