The acoustic dimension is a topic that has attracted cartographers for decades. In many examples of 2D and 3D cartography, sound-related matters have been used as map themes or/and as topics of cartographic communication. This article briefly summarizes relevant approaches that address the acoustic dimension in cartography. From the point of view of social constructivist landscape theory, there are several potentials associated with audiovisual stimuli: It deals with aspects of physical space that have so far been underrepresented in spatial research, it clarifies the contingency of spatial patterns of interpretation and evaluation, and it provides a basis for research into the social construction of the world, in this case landscape.

Digital maps are known as reliable media for communicating spatial information. People use maps to make themselves familiar with new environments and to form cognitive representations of spatial configurations and additional semantic information that are coupled with locational information. Since the mid-1990s, cartographers have explored auditory media as cartographic elements to transfer spatial information. Among the established sound variants used in multimedia cartography, speech recordings are a popular auditory tool to enrich the visual dominance of maps. The impact of auditory elements on human spatial memory has hardly been investigated so far in cartography and spatial cognition. A recent study showed that spoken object names bound to visual location markers affect performance in memory of object locations. Map users tend to make significantly smaller spatial distortion errors in the recall of object locations if these locations are coupled with auditory semantic information (place names). The present study extends this approach by examining possible effects on sound position as cues for spatial memory performance. A monaural condition, where an auditory name is presented in a spatial location corresponding to the object location, is compared with a binaural condition (of no directional cue). The results show that a monaural communication additionally improves spatial memory performance. Interestingly, the semantic information bound to an object location appears to be the driving factor in improving this effect.

The increasing importance of cognitively oriented visualization in cartography implies the use of modern approaches of experimental user studies. Such experiments are usually standardized, and researchers try to avoid confounding factors as much as possible. Therefore, modern experimental studies are based on digital, software-based methods and techniques to fulfil the demands. A set of established standard software exists which can partly be adopted to individual research questions in cartography and spatial cognition. However, these tools have not primarily been developed for the field of cartography and, thus, cartographic peculiarities are missing. For example, this can be related to the implementation of multimedia, incl. auditory (map) stimuli to investigate the impact of specific sound elements on cognitive processing in audiovisual cartography. This may also refer to the way (behavioural) user data measured during spatial tasks in maps are presented to the analyst. To make use of a more cartography-focused study software which can be used in map-based studies on spatial memory performance, an individual software tool was programmed. The tool is based on the object-oriented programming language ActionScript 3.0 and allows an easy customization due to its simplicity. The tool can be exported in the runtime system Adobe AIR and is highly suitable for lab studies. This paper presents some functionalities and peculiarities of this tool, including several examples of the written and commented scripting code.