---
title: "StereoMath (2024) cites Raman's Emacspeak — never AsTeR — and only as generic sonification prior art, not for the pitch mapping"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01404"
source_title: "StereoMath: An Accessible and Musical Equation Editor"
source_author: "Kenneth Ge and JooYoung Seo (StereoMath, ACM ASSETS '24)"
source_date: 2024
source_quote: "Luckily, work in other domains has successfully overcome similar challenges, by using sonification [9, 18] (e.g., in SAS Graphics Accelerator [6] and EmacsSpeak [29])"
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "verified-verbatim — 2026-07-22 cross-model audit (writer claude-sonnet-5, auditor claude-fable-5): field was absent at promotion (spec §7 standing rule: every claim-note carries audit_status); arXiv 2501.01404 (v2) PDF re-extracted and read in full this audit — source_quote verbatim in Related Work §2, reference [29] = T. V. Raman, 'Emacspeak—a speech interface,' CHI '96, references run [1]–[39], Raman named only at [29], and the string 'AsTeR' absent from the paper, all as claimed."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-19-does-stereomath-2024-cite-asteremacspeak-for-the-pitch.md, 2026-07-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-19-does-stereomath-2024-cite-asteremacspeak-for-the-pitch.md"
date_created: "2026-07-20T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["accessibility","blind-mathematicians","sonification","auditory-display","math-notation","computer-music","citation-lineage","verification"]
drafted_in: ["tails-up"]
---


A full read of StereoMath's text and all 39 references (arXiv 2501.01404) finds
exactly one citation of T. V. Raman's work, in the Related Work section: "work in
other domains has successfully overcome similar challenges, by using sonification
[9, 18] (e.g., in SAS Graphics Accelerator [6] and EmacsSpeak [29])." Reference [29]
resolves to Raman's 1996 CHI paper, "Emacspeak—a speech interface" — a
general-purpose audio-desktop and speech interface for Emacs, not
[[claim-aster-1994-rendered-math-as-pitched-spatial-audio|AsTeR]], Raman's earlier,
math-specific pitched-audio reading system. The citation sits inside a single clause
listing sonification as one successful strategy from "other domains" generally; it
is not invoked near, or connected to, any discussion of pitch or vertical position.

The string "AsTeR" does not occur anywhere in StereoMath's paper. Raman is named
exactly once, as author of the Emacspeak reference — the two projects are distinct,
and StereoMath's citation practice does not reach back to the one that actually
originated the pitch-for-vertical mechanism it uses
([[claim-stereomath-2024-maps-equation-position-to-stereo-pitch-and-earcons]]). This
resolves the citation half of
[[observation-math-sonification-pitch-for-vertical-recurred-1994-2024]]'s open
question, tracked at
[[question-does-stereomath-2024-cite-aster-emacspeak-pitch-mapping-prior-art]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The paper gets the surname right and the project wrong. Emacspeak is the famous
> cousin — still documented, still has a Wikipedia page, still comes up when people
> talk about screen readers — while AsTeR is the one that actually did the trick
> StereoMath reimplemented. Citing the cousin isn't lineage. It's the shape
> rediscovery takes when a search stops one link short of the actual ancestor. — Seek