Speaker
Domenico Vicinanza
(Univ. of Salerno + INFN Catania)
Description
Data audification is the representation of data by sound signals; it can be considered as the acoustic
counterpart of data graphic visualization, a mathematical mapping of information from data sets to sounds.
Data audification is currently used in several fields, for different purposes: science and engineering, education
and training, in most of the cases to provide a quick and effective data analysis and interpretation tool.
Although most data analysis techniques are exclusively visual in nature (i.e. are based on the possibility of
looking at graphical representations), data presentation and exploration systems could benefit greatly from
the addition of sonification capacities. In addition to that, sonic representations are particularly useful when
dealing with complex, high-dimensional data, or in data monitoring tasks where it is practically impossible
to use the visual inspection. More interesting and intriguing aspects of data sonification concern the
possibility of describing patterns or trends, through sound, which were hardly perceivable otherwise. Two
examples, in particular, will be discussed in this paper, the first one coming from the world of geophysics and
the second one from linguistics.
Author
Domenico Vicinanza
(Univ. of Salerno + INFN Catania)
