Audio effects to enhance spatial information displays

Vision and hearing are inherently different perceptual systems. The vision system is tuned to extract spatial information of surfaces and edges, while the auditory system is better suited to detect the temporal behavior of sources. However there are spatial audio effects that can be used to overcome some limitations of visual displays, especially when time-varying complex scenarios have to be rendered, and when the visual display devices are limited in size and complexity. We review some spatial sound effects and give hints for applications in information visualization.