What is sonification

When we make a sound to inform about something we are applying a sonification system. We represent data in the auditory field. We turn data into sounds, these data usually can be representing anything that can be expressed in numbers: a physical measurement, a notion, an action or the vectorial tracking of a sequence of values from a sensor. Many definitions were created for this process called sonification: from “subtype of auditory displays that use non-speech audio to represent information”, to “transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation” (Kramer et al., 1999) and, in a more definitive and precise way, “data-dependent generation of sound, if the transformation is systematic, objective and reproducible” (Hermann et al., 2011), and finally “technique of transforming non-audible data into sound that can be perceived by human hearing” (wikipedia on 9th of April 2024). To make it simple in the context of this manual we can state briefly that “sonification is the process of generating sound from any sort of data to represent their information as audio”. In even more simple terms we can say to a student that sonification describes data with sound as visualization does with graphs, flow charts, histograms etc.

So basically we want to combine data (Input) and sounds (Output), and decide the way these two are related (mapping or protocol). So a sonification system is defined by these 3 parts:

1 - Input data 2 - Output sounds 3 - Mapping or protocol

Type of Data and Sonification use

Sonification is increasingly used as a scientific tool to analyze and monitor data of several phenomena, and it evolved especially in the astronomical community due to the large amounts of data produced from observing the cosmos, but also as an artistic tool, and educational complement to other disciplines like medicine, mathematics, physics, chemistry but also geography, economy or even literature. For example in medicine, doctors monitor patients’ biometric reactions in real time without having to look at a screen. In literature an audio representation can be created a posteriori (in post-time) using the number of adjectives in a book, the number of times a certain word appears in an article. Any kind of data is made of numbers. And numbers can trigger audio because music and sound are fundamentally resumed to numbers, in the sense that we can describe those using numbers.