Sonification maps measured data onto audible changes exploiting auditory perception

Evidence

The underlying principle behind sonification is to take advantage of the perceptual processing power of the human hearing system to detect changes in or relationships between measured data sets. A key element of success in this process is deciding on the mapping between the measured data and the final audio signal. Ideally, the mapping should take advantage of changes in the audio signal that are going to be obvious to the listener; pitch, loudness and timbre are three potential candidates. But consideration must also be given to the signal itself, since (a) it might be the raw data itself, perhaps with the sampling rate being changed to place it within the human hearing range (data can be captured at any sampling rate, which could be well below or above what is audible, such as weather data that might be captured once every 24 hours or engine telemetry data that might be captured once every microsecond), or (b) the measured data could be used to change a feature of the sound to be used such as its pitch, vibrato, loudness or a filter setting. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2690

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what sonification is and how the data-to-sound mapping works, including the raw-data versus feature-modulation distinction.
• XREF: Relates to how noise/silence texts frame the ear as a powerful but underused analytic channel. — connects to: Sonograms visually expose vowel formants as enhanced frequency bands; Real-time auditory models enable speech recognition, sound reproduction, and hearing aids — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1564; Any measurable data can be rendered as sound to enable rapid pattern exploration (+6 more)
• SEED: A piece on ‘listening to data’ could frame sonification as a way to personally attune to slow environmental change by sonifying one’s own sensor readings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2690

Broader Connections

• Sonification renders time-varying data through pitch and timbre changes #expands (1.00)
• Auditory-model difference measures predict audible quality degradation #exemplifies (0.75)
• Perception of changing sound requires simultaneous time and frequency resolution #expands (0.72)
• Auditory Gestalt perception mirrors vision through spectral-pitch contours #expands (0.70) — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 2043