Project

Sonic Scientist

Building on well-developed data visualization techniques, audio is used to enhance understanding by improving the brain's ability to parse information in the scientific process. Sonification (aka auditory display) is the use of non-speech audio to convey information. In collaboration with the Media Lab, NASA is interested in using the human auditory system's powers of organizing and deconstructing sound for the purposes of scientific research and exploratory data analysis. Faced with increasingly voluminous and complex multimodal data and computations, researchers are seeking novel ways to optimize the conversion of information into knowledge. Several sonifications are under study, including interactive tours through the solar system, spectral data from Mars, sensor data from the Media Lab, new augmentations of the traditional orrery, and enhanced exploration of the Mandelbrot set. The eventual goal is to generalize these new sonification techniques for the display, exploration, and analysis of any large dataset.