Sounds sequential: sonification in the social sciences

Abstract

This article discusses the use of sound for auditory information display, and in particular its application for exploration of scientific data, known as sonification. Sonification can be defined as the use of sound to display data of scientific interest in order to investigate structures, trends or patterns in the data. Background is provided from several perspectives: the use of the senses in the history of science, the strengths of human hearing, the recent technological availability of auditory interfaces, the development of sonification itself, and differentiation of sonification from musical practices. In Western science, as in Western culture, the eye has become the predominant organ of sense; using the ear consciously in research thus implicitly questions the implications of the eye's predominance. As practical examples, two applications of sonification to data-sets from the social sciences are discussed in detail. We argue that the most promising areas of application of sonification within the social sciences are in the exploration of sequential data. Our two examples both concern sets of sequential data, one temporal, the other spatial (geographical). Discussion of these examples is followed by consideration of the practical and cultural implications of working with sonification. We thus hope to further the use of sonification in the social sciences, not as an alternative to visualisation or statistical approaches, but as a complementary tool of data analysis and exploration.