Alberto de Campo: Science by Ear: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sonifying Scientific Data (2009)

Sonification of Scientific Data is intrinsically interdisciplinary: It requires collaboration between experts in the respective scientific domains, in psychoacoustics, in artistic design of synthetic sound, and in working with appropriate programming environments. The SonEnvir project hosted at IEM Graz put this view into practice: in four domain sciences, sonification designs for current research questions were realised.

This dissertation contributes to sonification research in three aspects:

The body of sonification designs realised within the SonEnvir context is described, which may be reused in sonification research in different ways.

The software framework built with and for these sonification designs is presented, which supports fluid experimentation with evolving sonification designs.

A theoretical model for sonification design work, the Sonification Design Space Map, was synthesised based the analysis of this body of sonification designs (and a few selected others). This model allows systematic reasoning about the process of creating sonification designs, and provides concepts for analysing and categorising existing sonifications designs more systematically.

Dissertation
Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics – IEM, University for Music and Dramatic Arts Graz, February 2009
Supervisors: Robert Höldrich, Curtis Roads
211 pages

SonEnvir research project

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