Data sonification

Sonification for creating awareness

• Climate data: temperature, CO2 emissions
• Sea level

Sonification to support analysis

Sonification can help detect patterns in data that are hard to find in other domains.

Some examples:

• Heart rate sonification as medical tool
• Traffic data
• Seismologic data
• CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle collision data

Sonification for artistic application

• Ryoji Ikeda
• Timo Bingmann - Slow Sort

Important considerations

• Reliable data source
• Preparing data (and how to deal with missing data)
• Data cleaning, e.g. filtering
• Data normalisation to prevent parameter tweaking and facilitating comparison of data from different sources
• Mapping & appropriate sound selection

Mapping parameters

Some (less) obvious examples:

• pitch
• volume
• event duration
• entropy
• dimensionality / wideness
• spectral flatness
• musicality

Avoid masking and patterns that are too complex to grasp.