Development
of sonification design theorgy: Metaphors, mappings, holistic sound design,
and data-specific sonification
This research seeks to discover the optimal data-to-display mappings for
use in scientific sonification and investigate whether these optimal mappings
vary within and/or across fields of application. To accomplish this, we use a
cross-platform research environment that incorporates sophisticated sound synthesis
and data collection capabilities. The sound synthesis engine allows for the precise
control of many auditory dimensions, so that we can explore a range of promising
new ways to map data onto sound.
Sonification
Mappings Database on the Web
This online database contains references to, and the description of studies
or applications where sound has been used to represent data. Of particular interest
is how the data is mapped to the sound. You can search for specific scientific
areas, data dimensions, display dimensions, or other elements in the bibliographic
reference to the study (author, title, etc.). You may also add references to works
not already cited.
'Sound
Advice' Design Tool
The Sound Advice database is a searchable repository of references which
pertain to the design of auditory displays. These references are stored with searchable
tags describing the various aspects of the data, methods, task environment, and
equipment used, thus making it easy to find the right reccomendation for sonifying
your data. This project is currently still in the design phase, and is not ready
for use yet.
Sonification
of statistical graphs: The effects of using different dimensions of sound to
map auditory boxplot
An important issue in designing auditory displays of quantitative data is
choosing the dimension(s) of sound to employ. This series of experiments has been
designed to investigate which dimensions of sound are best suited for auditory
display of boxplots. Boxplots are a simple statistical graph that contain information
about the skew, spread and central tendency of a distribution.
In the first two experiments in this series, we found that temporal and pitch
were better than spatial location for mapping auditory boxplots. Moreover, we
found no gain and some evidence of loss for using the dimensions of pitch and
location redundantly to display the same quantitative data.
In the third study, we are investigating whether these results would generalize
to a situation where there is less attention available to devote to the auditory
task and to other combinations of dimensions. We are using the single dimensions
of pitch, loudness, and temporal as well as the redundant combinations of pitch
and loudness (thought to be integral dimensions) and pitch and temporal (thought
to be separable dimensions). Additionally, in some conditions, the auditory task
was combined with a concurrent task of monitoring a changing visual display.
Sonification
of Absolute Values