Translations:Sonification in practice/73/en

In a sonification system, which is our final product, the data is the source of the sound engine, and some particular sounds will be the output. The inputs and outputs are mapped onto each other following a protocol that establishes which sounds are played according to which data. So first we need to know and understand the data we want to sonify. We must know what we want to say with our system - what we will talk about. We must know how the data change (usually we have time based data but there can also be spatially referenced data, like maps) and what characteristics of its behavior we want to represent. For example if you have a single value (like luminosity of a star, linear position of a car, amount of likes in a youtube channel, number of new posts on wikipedia, etc) you can choose to play a sound when this value is more than a certain threshold value, or play a sound that gets louder when the values becomes higher, or a sound when the values are raising or decreasing in time. In some cases it is useful to determine the highest and the lowest value within the whole range of values available. In terms of outputs this can help define a “container” of initial values that can define the range of deviations in the output. We can highlight certain features of data. There are many types of data. The most common are: