Alberto de Campo

Sounds sequential: sonification in the social sciences

Abstract This article discusses the use of sound for auditory information display, and in particular its application for exploration of scientific data, known as sonification. Sonification can be defined as the use of sound to display data of scientific interest in order to investigate structures, trends or patterns in the data. Background is provided from several perspectives: the use of the senses in the history of science, the strengths of human hearing, the recent technological availability of auditory interfaces, the development of sonification itself, and differentiation of sonification from musical practices. In Western science, as in Western culture, the eye has become the predominant organ of sense; using the ear consciously in research thus implicitly questions the implications of the eyes predominance. As practical examples, two applications of sonification to data-sets from the social sciences are discussed in detail. We argue that the most promising areas of application of sonification within the social sciences are in the exploration of sequential data. Our two examples both concern sets of sequential data, one temporal, the other spatial (geographical). Discussion of these examples is followed by consideration of the practical and cultural implications of working with sonification. We thus hope to further the use of sonification in the social sciences, not as an alternative to visualisation or statistical approaches, but as a complementary tool of data analysis and exploration.

Three Flavors of Post-Instrumentalities: The Musical Practices of, and a Many-Festo by Trio Brachiale

This article offers a shared account of one out of a pluriverse of possible musics in the 21st century, with three personal perspectives. It is written by a trio of musicians/artists/researchers, who have been co-inventing an idiosyncratic style of music, including its instruments, compositional strategies, and performance systems. We articulate our artistic aims in a many-festo, discuss the background that informs our thinking, give examples of related artistic instrument design, and explain aspects of our own work that exemplify our essential insights and resulting tenets.

SONIFICATION OF MONOPOLES AND CHAOS IN QCD

Sonification is defined as the use of non-speech audio to extract information from data and it represents the sound analogue to graphical visualization. The method is applied in several disciplines from economy to medicine to physics. Sonification might also help in analyzing data of lattice QCD. It could assist, together with graphical display, to examine the behavior of lattice observables as a function of parameters like gauge coupling, quark mass, etc. Sonification might further be used to identify unique characteristics of single gauge-field configurations out of many such as, for example, the topological content. In order to demonstrate the methodology for quantum chromodynamics we analyze the monopole order parameter from the confinement to the deconfinement phase. We further produce a sound file for the Lyapunov exponents of classical U(1) and SU(2) gauge theory. The studies are also part of the development of program packages for audio browsing within the interdisciplinary research project SonEnvir (http://sonenvir.at/).