In this dissertation, Rune investigates how users experience and interact with sound zone systems. Sound plays a natural part of our everyday lives, and over the past several decades, we, as humans, have grown accustomed to enjoying different kinds of media in a plethora of ways, such as through headphones. A novel approach to personal audio experiences is through sound zone technology. This technology enables multiple listeners in the same room to experience shared and personal listening without the need for conventional personal audio technologies.

Rune has through laboratory and field studies utilised both quantitative and qualitative methods to generate comprehensive insight into how people can interact with sound zones and how they experience them. Sound zone systems can be interacted with through both feedback and control devices. Rune has identified how people can receive feedback on sound zones through visualisations. It is shown that subtle visualisations can perform similarly to more direct visualisations, which allows people to have less obtrusive visualisations that they may attend to when needed rather than all the time. Additionally, shapes can help align user understandings and expectations of sound zone capabilities, for instance, by showing shapes that communicate how sound zones manifest in a room. Users controlled sound zones with position-tracked tangible controllers, which allowed them to change the spatial properties of individual sound zones to create personal audio experiences. Sound zones allow users to regulate the audio exposure in a room for both listeners and non-listeners, thereby, allowing users to remain co-located in shared spaces. This allows for catering to people with different listening preferences, for instance, increased volume for people hard of hearing, without affecting others. Finally, Rune contributes five design guidelines to direct future designs for interacting with sound zone technology. These are a synthesis of the findings across the papers on how people can interact with sound zone technology for personal audio.

Members of the assessment committee are Professor Steve Benford, University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), Associate Professor Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose, Aarhus University (Denmark), and Associate Professor Markus Löchtefeld (chairman), Aalborg University (Denmark). Supervisor for the thesis has been Professor Mikael B. Skov, Aalborg University. Co-supervisor for the thesis has been Professor Jesper Kjeldskov, Aalborg University. Moderator Associate Professor Anders Rysholt Bruun, Aalborg University.

All interested parties are welcome. After the defense the department will be hosting a small reception in cluster 5.