Any measurable data can be sonified to explore long timescales rapidly

Evidence

Sound is a complex basis for communication in terms of speech and music, and advantage is taken of this in the field of “sonification,” which is making use of audio as a means of communicating changes in measured data. Instead of plotting a graph of a measured variation such as rainfall over the past 12 months, the data is used to control an aspect of synthesized audio, such as pitch, loudness or timbre, enabling long durations of experimentally measured data to be explored rapidly. The timescale of the sonified version of the data in terms of how long it lasts can be varied as desired; it would be perfectly possible, for example, to take rainfall data for a number of years and play it back in minutes or even seconds simply by setting different data flow rates. It depends on the nature of the changing features of interest. Any measurable data in any field has the potential to be sonified, such as telemetry data from space vehicles or Formula One cars, data from devices that monitor health functions, weather data, data from historical records, geological data and data relating to everyday living. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2687

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines sonification/auditory display clearly with concrete parameters (pitch, loudness, timbre) and applications.
• SEED: A personal listening practice could be built around sonifying one’s own health or daily data — turning quantified living into sound.
• XREF: Connects to Deep Listening’s treatment of the whole soundscape as composition — sonification extends that frame to data streams.