Sounds sequential: Sonification in the social sciences

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 349-364

  Dayé, Christian ^a   De Campo, Alberto ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ   (Austria)

^b Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics   (Austria)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANALYSIS AND EXPLORATIONS; AUDITORY INTERFACES; COMPLEMENTARY TOOLS; CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS; HISTORY OF SCIENCE; INFORMATION DISPLAY; ITS APPLICATIONS; STATISTICAL APPROACH;

SOCIAL SCIENCES;

EID: 33947115993     PISSN: 03080188     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/030801806X143286     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. To give just a few examples: so-called screen readers assist visually impaired computer users by 'reading' the text displayed on computer screens - for a critical overview see T. Stockman: The design and evaluation of auditory access to spreadsheets', Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Sydney, Australia, 2004, www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/ Conferences/ICAD2004/posters/stockman.pdf; a German team developed a microelectronic system to provide acoustic information and orientation for visually impaired users in cities, see M. Kemmerling and H.-J. Schliepkorte: 'An orientation and information system for blind people based on RF-speech beacons', in Improving the Quality of Life for the European Citizen, (ed. I. Palacencia Porrero and E. Ballabio), 275-278; 1998, Amsterdam, IOS Press; and Scottish researchers developed a system called ScripTalker, which uses scripted conversations to help non-speaking people accomplish communication tasks more effectively, see R, Dye et al.: ScripTalker - an AAC system incorporating scripts', in Improving the Quality of Life for the European Citizen, pp. 310-313.
2. J. Ortega y Gasset: Betrachtungen über die Technik; 1949, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (first published in Spanish as Meditation de la técnica, 1939).
3. cf. T. Stockman: 'The design and evaluation of auditory access to spreadsheets' (see Note 1) and G. Kramer (ed.): Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification and Auditory Interfaces; 1994, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley.
4. G. Kramer: 'An introduction to auditory display', in Auditory Display, (ed. G. Kramer), 1-77; 1994, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley. See pp. 6-15 for a comprehensive summary of the advantages and drawbacks of auditory displays.
5. Since Pythagoras is reported to have travelled widely in Egypt and the East, it is also possible that this observation may have been imported by him from the Orient.
6. G. Neuwirth: 'Erzählung von Zahlen', in Musik-Konzepte 26/27: Josquin des Prés; 1982, Munich, edition text+kritik.
7. I. Xenakis: Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition; 1992, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press is a major reference work in contemporary music.
8. See the works of Vilém Flusser, especially Medienkultur, 1997, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, and Kommunikologie; 1998, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer.
9. H. Blumenberg: Höblenausgänge; 1996, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
10. H. Blumenberg: Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 1986, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
11. B. Latour and S. Woolgar: Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts; 1986, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press (revised edition with an introduction by Jonas Salk and a new postscript by the authors).
12. T. Kleinspehn: Der flüchtige Blick: Sehen und Identität in der Kultur der Neuzeit; 1989, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt.
13. This story is reported in S. Drake: Galilei; 1999, Freiburg, Herder; its meaning is reflected on in F. Dombois: "Wann hören? Vom Forschen mit den Ohren', in Chemie - Kultur - Geschichte: Festschrift für Hans-Werner Schütt anlässlich seines 65. Geburtstags, (ed. A. Schürmann and B. Weiss), 79-92; 2002, Berlin, Diepholz.
14. W. Kutschmann: Der Naturwissenschaftler und sein Körper: Die Rolle der 'inneren Natur' in der experimentellen Naturwissenschaft der frühen Neuzeit, 303-309; 1986, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
15. Building on the definition of the aim of visualisation in R. M. Friedhoff: 'Is visualization really necessary? The role of visualization in science, engineering and medicine', in Visualization, 1993, 343-346; 1993, Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE Computer Society, we would define perceptualisation as the attempt to substitute conscious thinking with preconscious perceptual competencies.
16. S. Traweek: Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High-Energy Physicists; 1988, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
17. See, for instance, S. Barrass: 'Sonification design patterns', Proceedings of ICAD 2003, Boston, MA, USA, 2003, www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/ Conferences/ICAD2003/paper/42%20Barrass.pdf; S. C. Peres and D. M. Lane: 'Sonification of statistical graphs', Proceedings of ICAD 2003, Boston, MA, USA, 2003, www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2003/paper/38%20Peres.pdf.
18. E. J. S. Hovenga and W. Sermeus: 'Data analysis methods', in Textbook in Health Informatics: A Nursing Perspective, (ed. J. Mantas and A. Hasman), 113-125; 2002, Amsterdam, IOS Press.
19. When we say that the sound events arc determined by the data, we are not ignoring the fact that there is a translation process where the researcher has to decide how the data influence the sound parameters.
20. 'Bonification report: status of the field and research agenda', prepared for the National Science Foundation by members of the International Community for Auditory Display, 1997, www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/References/nsf.html.
21. A more detailed description of these, and other, techniques is included in T. Hermann: Sonification for Exploratory Data Analysis, PhD thesis, University of Bielefeld, Germany, 2002.
22. For earthquake seismology, see F. Dombois: 'Using audification in planetary seismology', Proceedings of ICAD 2001, Espoo, Finland, 2001, www.acoustics.hut.fi/icad2001/proceedings/papers/dombois.pdf; also 'Auditory seismology', a webpage maintained by Florian Dombois at www.auditory-seismology. org. For EEG data see T. Hermann et al.: 'Sonifications for EEG data analysis', Proceedings of ICAD 2002, Kyoto, Japan, 2002, www.icad.org/websiteV2. 0/Conferences/ICAD2002/proceedings/22_Thomas_Hermann_EEG.pdf; T. Hinterberger et al.: 'Auditory feedback of human EEG for direct brain - computer communication", Proceedings of ICAD 2004, Sydney, Australia, 2004, www.icad.org/website V2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/papers/hinterberger_etal.pdf; T. Hinterberger and G. Baier: 'Parametric orchestral sonification of EEG in real time', IEEE MultiMedia, 2005, 12, (2), 70-79. For sonification of stock-market data see K. V. Nesbitt and S. Barrass: 'Evaluation of a multimodal sonification and visualization of depth of market stock data', Proceedings of ICAD 2002, Kyoto, Japan, 2002, www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2002/ proceedings/51_KeithNesbitt.pdf.
23. The Sonification Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed some easy-to-handle software called Sonification Sandbox which supports parameter mappings. It is freely available at http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu.
24. The advantages of model-based sonifications are described in T. Hermann: Sonification for Exploratory Data Analysis, pp. 70-80 (see Note 21).
25. A. de Campo and M. Egger de Campo: 'Sonification of social data', Proceedings of the 1999 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Beijing, China, 1999, 281-283.
26. C. Dayé, A. de Campo and M. Egger de Campo: 'Sonifikationen in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Datenanalyse', Angewandte Sozialforschung, 2006, 24, 41-56. See also in the same volume the reviews by C. Frauenberger (pp. 56-60) and A. Müller (pp. 61-64) and our response to them (p. 65).
27. SonEnvir: Designing a Generalized Sonification Environment for Scientific Data; for further information see the project's homepage at http://sonenvir.at.
28. A. de Campo, C. Frauenberger and R. Höldrich: 'Designing a generalized sonification environment', Proceedings of ICAD 2004, Sydney, Australia, 2004, www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/posters/ campo_etal.pdf.
29. We base our comments on A. Abbott: 'A primer on sequence methods', Organisation Science, 1990, 1, 375-392;
30. A. Abbott: 'Sequence analysis: new methods for old ideas', Annual Review of Sociology, 1995, 21, 93-113;
31. H.-P. Blossfeld, A. Hamerle and K. U. Mayer: Ereignisanalyse: Statistische Theorie und Anwendung in den Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften; 1986, Frankfurt am Main, Campus (English title: Event History Analysis);
32. H. P. Blossfeld and G. Rohwer: Techniques of Event History Modelling New Approaches to Causal Analysis; 1995, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
33. For a general introduction to this project see P. Panek et al.: 'Friendly rest room project: a toilet prototype for improving the quality of life of old people and persons with disability', in Assistive Technology - From Virtuality to Reality, (ed. A. Pruski and H. Knops), 8-12; 2005, Amsterdam, IOS Press.
34. C. Dayé et al.: 'Sonification as a tool to reconstruct users' actions in unobservable areas', Proceedings of ICAD 2005, Limerick, Ireland, 2005, www.idc.ul.ie/icad2005/downloads/f66.pdf.
35. Some considerations on this topic are included in A. de Campo et al.: 'Sonification as an interdisciplinary working process', Proceedings of ICAD 2006, London, UK, 2006, www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/icad2006/procecdings/papers/f54. pdf.
36. B. Latour and S. Woolgar: Laboratory Life, p. 51 (sec Note 11).