''a posteriori'' sonification

The great majority of sonification examples available on the web are audio files that represent a sequence of several data layers of a certain phenomena (physical, astronomical but also metadata, web statistics, economics, health parameters) during a certain period of time. These are stored data converted to an audio file.

We call a posteriori when the data is sonified after being collected and stored. a posteriori comes from Latin and means "from the latter" or "from the one behind". It is usually used in philosophy to refer to a statement that comes after experience. While in real-time sonification we do not know what exactly will be the next data input, in a posteriori sonification, when we store a sequence of data we can take our time to analyze it and adjust our output sounds and test them. The data set is translated into a sound piece as a whole.

TwoTone

There are many a posteriori sonification applications that you can find online. TwoTone is a software program by Google that allows you to generate sounds from data. This software has its own database, and it is updated regularly. This shows how popular sonification is.

TwoTone is a flexible software that allows one to add multiple data tracks from a data source and map the data to a chosen scale, choosing the instrument, the octave, range, starting octave, tempo, etc. The user can also add soundtracks from the database, upload its soundtracks, and record sound from the microphone.

Explore the database

To start playing with it, TwoTone comes with a database that the user can explore to test the software features. After you feel comfortable with it, you can import your own data.

a posterior sonification example with twotone.

a posterior sonification example with twotone.