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Aesthetic strategies in sonification

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Abstract

Sound can be listened to in various ways and with different intentions. Multiple factors influence how and what we perceive when listening to sound. Sonification, the acoustic representation of data, is in essence just sound. It functions as sonification only if we make sure to listen attentively in order to access the abstract information it contains. This is difficult to accomplish since sound always calls the listener’s attention to concrete—whether natural or musical—points of references. Important aspects determining how we listen to sonification are discussed in this paper: elicited sounds, repeated sounds, conceptual sounds, technologically mediated sounds, melodic sounds, familiar sounds, multimodal sounds and vocal sounds. We discuss how these aspects help the listener engage with the sound, but also how they can become points of reference in and of themselves. The various sonic qualities employed in sonification can potentially open but also risk closing doors to the accessibility and perceptibility of the sonified data.

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Notes

  1. For an in depth overview on sonification in medical diagnostics as discussed in Sects. 2 and 3, please confer Baier and Hermann (2008).

  2. Translation from Grond and Schubert-Minski (2009): I would also like to consult the ear on this, though in such a way that the intellect articulates what the ear would naturally have to say.

  3. Translation by the author: the telephone is an instrument of exquisite sensitivity. This fact led me to compare it with the nerve, which was considered to be the most sensitive reactant for electricity since the famous experiments of Galvani.

  4. Translation by the author The recently demonstrated capacity of the telephone, to indicate the negative oscillations of the muscle current, motivated me to verify if the telephone could possibly serve to indicate the galvanic response of the excited nerve.

  5. http://g-turns.com/.

  6. http://www.antarktika.at/.

  7. Indexicality in sonification has also been discussed by Vickers and Hogg (2006).

  8. http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=268.

  9. For an overview on electromyography and auditory display see Bonner and Devleschoward (1995) and Walton (1952).

  10. http://www.semiconductorfilms.com.

  11. http://www.grond.at/html/projects/intermittent/intermittent.htm.

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Acknowledgements

Some historic aspects mentioned in this article have been published by the first author together with Theresa Schubert-Minski in the book see this sound Grond and Schubert-Minski (2009). The authors want to acknowledge further fruitful discussions with the participants of the Science by Ear symposium February 2010 in Graz. Finally, these thoughts were evaluated and compiled after integrating the important feedback from the sonification symposium March 2010 in Aix-en-Provence.

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Correspondence to Florian Grond.

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Grond, F., Hermann, T. Aesthetic strategies in sonification. AI & Soc 27, 213–222 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-011-0341-7

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