As humans, we possess inherent perceptual and motor skills: Our stereoscopic vision provides us with depth information and our spatial hearing can localize sounds around us with high accuracy. Our hands are capable of controlling motion with high precision and speed which allows us to write, draw, or play an instrument. Throughout our history we have developed and shaped physical tools that extend and leverage these skills. One important tool of our time, the personal computer equipped with mouse and keyboard, however, is not particularly fit to tasks outside the office domain and falling short of fully leveraging our natural skills. Among the types of information we manage with computers, time-based media like audio recordings, is a comparatively young form of information. Since their debut in the 19th century, audio recording and playback interfaces were always designed along technical constraints. The aim of this thesis is to create audio playback interfaces that leverage our natural skills to a larger extend. To increase the interaction bandwidth, we systematically augmented each of the three modalities involved in the interaction: haptic, visual, and auditory.
First, we increased the haptic interaction bandwidth for mobile audio players through different wearable interfaces. They build on the affordances of fabric and allow us to use our fine manual motor skills to control playback parameters.
Second, we built on an existing interface for audio playback with an already high haptic interaction bandwidth: the DJ turntable. We extended its visual bandwidth to re-create visual cues for navigation that were lost during the process of digitalization. We could thereby re-locate the haptic input and visual output to a single device.
Third, we increased the auditive interaction bandwidth by integrating a spatial component to recorded audio. This let us create engaging audio augmented reality experiences. However, the increased audio interaction bandwidth also provides much more parameters to be controlled. We evaluated the use of different metaphors to control these parameters in a natural way.