Article Idea:
sound for data representation
suggested by Ankur Sardana on 2006/01/30
I have been wondering about the importance of sound in the representation of quantitative information. I could find numerous PhD Thesis on sonification (use of non-speech audio to convey information) but could not really find examples of actual usage. Sound has been used as an alarm since ages, for it doesn’t require the listener to be present in a specific position or location. From `belling the cat’ to modern day fire alrms, use of sound has been successful and quite rightly. But would the usage of sound remain restricted to alarms. When used with other techniques, like graphs would it become `chartjunk’ or can it make more sense. Can the usage of sound with normal data representation techniques help the viewer analyse the data quicker ? And though most researches show it can be done, why is it actually not widely practised ?
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
3 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
Liz Danzico
1095 Reputation points
Posted 2006/02/11 @ 19:15PM with
Ankur: This seems interesting. You might also consider what Max Lord has written about in the past for B&A:
*Why Is That Thing Beeping? A Sound Design Primer*
(http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/why_is_that_thing_beep…)
Ankur Sardana
8 Reputation points
Posted 2006/02/19 @ 22:56PM with
Thanks Liz,
Been thru Max’s article earlier…and I must admit its quite a good starting point. Though my point is that even though we realise the importance of sonification, it is not being used as much. Is it due to the cultural contexts ? regional contexts ? is East louder and hence more open to sonification than West ?
Max Lord
30 Reputation points
Posted 2006/02/22 @ 09:55AM with
Hi Ankur
Did you see the article on the sonification of network traffic that was done recently? It was in the news.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20060209/tc_cmp/179102057
Why isn’t this actually practiced more often? I think there may be hidden perils involved with being steeped in fake light classical music 8 hours a day. We simply do not know yet. On a less flippant note, the actual composition issues are very complex. Any collaboration between programmers and composers is going to be challenging.
Good suggestion.
Ankur Sardana
8 Reputation points
Posted 2006/02/27 @ 03:29AM with
Hi Max,
Thanks for the article. Increases my faith in the idea.
I am sure there are more issues than people being visually biased. Starting from identifying the parameters of sound to be used as dimensions to the programmer – composer – designer combination ( I guess the designer will have to take the roles to prototype atleast ) there are deeper issues involved…
a nice article :
http://neuro.caltech.edu/~lshams/Nature-reprint.pdf
Jack Stockholm
1 Reputation points
Posted 2006/09/17 @ 11:41AM with
Great thread! I’m exploring this topic for Master’s thesis ideas. From my initial search, it appears that some seminal work in this field was done by ES Yeung, the current Program Director of Chemical and Biological Sciences at Ames Lab. He published an article in the journal Analytical Chemistry in 1980 titled, “Pattern recognition by audio representation of multivariate analytical data”.
I’ve provided two links below. The first is the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Sonification project run last year which created the software tool: xSonify. The second is a PowerPoint presentation of a prototype for xSonify which goes into a bit more detail about audio representation and what they hoped to achieve with the project.
http://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/research/sonification/sonificat…
http://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pubs/Candey_AGU2005_xSonify_Dec…