Sonification Support for Visualization

Sonification is the auditory equivalent to visualization, i.e. mapping of data characteristics to sound parameters, and has been proven to support visual perception and visual analysis of data. There are ever- growing amounts of data in today’s society, and the sheer amount of visual information can make visual analysis a difficult task. Keeping humans in the loop is important as human experiences and judgements are vital for successful analysis, and sonification can be used to facilitate this. This research project aims to investigate how sonification can be used to support visual perception, facilitate interpretation of visualization, and improve visual data analysis with a multimodal approach.

The work within the project has so far explored:

• The use of sonification to support interpretation and comprehension of visualized complex data.
• Interactive sonficiation as a support for perception of brightness contrast.
• Parameter mapped sonification as support for interactive data search.

While these following areas are currently under investigation:

• Sonification support for visualization in an area size recall task.
• Sonification as a mean of simplify the understanding of visualized mathematical concepts.
• Sonification for communication of collected and visualized construction site data.