Listen: A data sonification toolkit

Catherine M. Wilson, Suresh K. Lodha
Thesis Document: listen.doc

Purpose of the System

1. The primary goal of Listen was to design a flexible, adaptable, extensible, portable, and interactive toolkit for the sonification of data that will encourage the incorporation of sonification into the research environment. Data sonification is the representation of data using sound. Scientific visualization is defined as the graphical representation of data; data sonification is its audio equivalent.
2. Listen maps data values to properties of sound, such as pitch, volume, and duration. These values are intuitively interpreted in terms of magnitude.
3. Listens graphical user interface is highly interactive and intuitive in order to encourage experimentation. It is also very easy to incorporate Listen into any existing visualization system.

Uncertainty Information

1. The fluid flow uncertainty of UFLOW at any point is computed as the difference between the flow attributes at the corresponding points of two particle traces.
2. The geometric uncertainty of Surf at any point is the difference between the geometric quantities of two interpolant.

Input Data

1. Listen was incorporated into UFLOW, a system for visualizing fluid flow uncertainty. UFLOW computes several different particle traces using different numerical integration algorithms.
2. Listen was also incorporated into Surf, which displays the geometric uncertainty of surface interpolants. The system computes interpolants such as multiquadric, inverse multiquadric, thin plate spline, linear, bilinear, and bicubic.

Sonification Clues/Queues

1. Sound patterns
2. Changes in sound frequency, amplitude, etc.
3. Sound alerts to highlights errors or interesting events

User Interface

Listen is very object-oriented and is broken up into different modules that have minimum interaction with each other. The sound device module is responsible for initializing the sound equipment and playing sounds. The sound mapping module keeps track of how the data is to be mapped to the sound parameters. The data manager module extracts all the important information from the data. All three modules only talk to the control module. The control module also talks to the Interface module, which handles user input and user feedback.

Future Work

Meaningful sonification must be implemented in a datadriven environment in which analysts can easily apply the tool to any data set of interest. Sonification applications must have the ability to be integrated into existing visualization systems with ease.