Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data. Auditory perception has advantages in temporal, spatial, amplitude, and frequency resolution that open possibilities as an alternative or complement to visualization techniques. For example, the rate of clicking of a Geiger counter conveys the level of radiation in the immediate vicinity of the device. Though many experiments with data sonification have been explored in forums such as the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD), sonification faces many challenges to widespread use for presenting and analyzing data. For example, studies show it is difficult, but essential, to provide adequate context for interpreting sonifications of data. Many sonification attempts are coded from scratch due to the lack of flexible tooling for sonification research and data exploration.
History The Geiger counter, invented in 1908, is one of the earliest and most successful applications of sonification. A Geiger counter has a tube of low-pressure gas; each particle detected produces a pulse of current when it ionizes the gas, producing an audio click. The original version was only capable of detecting alpha particles. In 1928, Geiger and Walther Müller (a PhD student of Geiger) improved the counter so that it could detect more types of ionizing radiation. In 1913, Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe of University of Birmingham invented the optophone, which used selenium photosensors to detect black print and convert it into an audible output. A blind reader could hold a book up to the device and hold an apparatus to the area she wanted to read. The optophone played a set group of notes: g c' d' e' g' b' c e. Each note corresponded with a position on the optophone's reading area, and that note was silenced if black ink was sensed. Thus, the missing notes indicated the positions where black ink was on the page and could be used to read. Pollack and Ficks published the first perceptual experiments on the transmission of information via auditory display in 1954. They experimented with combining sound dimensions such as timing, frequency, loudness, duration, and spatialization and found that they could get subjects to register changes in multiple dimensions at once. These experiments did not get into much more detail than that, since each dimension had only two possible values. In 1970, Nonesuch Records released a new electronic music composition by the American composer Charles Dodge, "The Earth's Magnetic Field." It was produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. As the title suggests, the composition's electronic sounds were synthesized from data from the earth's magnetic field. As such, it may well be the first sonification of scientific data for artistic, rather than scientific, purposes. John M. Chambers, Max Mathews, and F.R. Moore at Bell Laboratories did the earliest work on auditory graphing in their "Auditory Data Inspection" technical memorandum in 1974. They augmented a scatterplot using sounds that varied along frequency, spectral content, and amplitude modulation dimensions to use in classification. They did not do any formal assessment of the effectiveness of these experiments. In 1976, philosopher of technology, Don Ihde, wrote, "Just as science seems to produce an infinite set of visual images for virtually all of its phenomena--atoms to galaxies are familiar to us from coffee table books to science magazines; so 'musics,' too, could be produced from the same data that produces visualizations." This appears to be one of the earliest references to sonification as a creative practice. In early 1982 Sara Bly of the University of California, Davis, released two publications - with examples - of her work on the use of computer-generated sound to present data. At the time, the field of scientific visualization was gaining momentum. Among other things, her studies and the accompanying examples compared the properties between visual and aural presentation, demonstrating that "Sound offers an enhancement and an alternative to graphic tools." Her work provides early experiment-based data to help inform matching appropriate data representation to type and purpose.
Also in the 1980s, pulse oximeters came into widespread use. Pulse oximeters can sonify oxygen concentration of blood by emitting higher pitches for higher concentrations. However, in practice this particular feature of pulse oximeters may not be widely utilized by medical professionals because of the risk of too many audio stimuli in medical environments. In 1990, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications began generating scientific data sonifications and visualizations from the same source data and a paper describing this work was presented at the June 1991 SPIE Conference on Extracting Meaning from Complex Data. Included in the supporting information for the paper was a video, winner of the 1991 Nicograph Multimedia Grand Prize, comprising several data visualizations paired with their corresponding data sonifications. In 1992, the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) was founded by Gregory Kramer as a forum for research on auditory display which includes data sonification. ICAD has since become a home for researchers from many different disciplines interested in the use of sound to convey information through its conference and peer-reviewed proceedings. In 2020, the composer Simon Gray recording as The Winterval Conspiracy produced a sonification of the SARS-Cov-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic in the form of a musical fugue. In May 2022, NASA reported the sonification (converting astronomical data associated with pressure waves into sound) of the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. In 2024, Adhyâropa Records released The Volcano Listening Project by Leif Karlstrom, which merges geophysics research and computer music synthesis with acoustic instrumental and vocal performances by Billy Contreras, Todd Sickafoose, and other acoustic musicians.
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