Ars Informatica -- Ars Electronica: Improving Sonification Aesthetics

In this paper we discuss æsthetic issues of sonifications. We posit that many sonifications have suffered from poor acoustic ecology which makes listening more difficult, thereby resulting in poorer data extraction and inference on the part of the listener. Lessons are drawn from the electro acoustic music community as we argue that it is not instructive to distinguish between sonifications and music/sound art. Edgar Var`ese defined music as organised sound and sonifications organise sound to reflect some aspect of the thing being sonified. Therefore, we propose that sonification designers can improve the communicative ability of their auditory displays by paying attention to the æsthetic issues that are well known to composers, orchestrators, sound designers & artists, and recording engineers

MalLo March: A Live Sonified Performance With User Interaction

Presented at the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2016)In this extended abstract we present a new performance piece titled MalLo March that uses MalLo, a predictive percussion instrument, to allow for real-time sonification of live performers. The piece consists of two movements where in the first movement audience members will use a web application and headphones to listen to a sonification of MalLo instruments as they are played live on stage. During the second movement each audience member will use an interface in the web app to design their own sonification of the instruments to create a personalized version of the performance. We present an overview of the hardware and interaction design, highlighting various listening modes that provide audience members with different levels of control in designing the sonification of the live performers

Sonification and Music, Music and Sonification

Despite it being more than twenty years since the launch of an international conference series dedicated to its study, there is still much debate over what sonification really is, and especially as regards its relationship to music. A layman’s definition of sonification might be that it is the use of non-speech audio to communicate data, the aural counterpart to visualization. Many researchers have claimed musicality for their sonifications, generally when using data-to-pitch mappings. In 2006 Bennett Hogg and I (Vickers and Hogg 2006) made a rather provocative assertion that bound music and sonification together (q.v., and further developed in Vickers (2006)), not so much to claim an ontological truth but to foreground a debate that has simmered since the first International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) in 1992. Since then there has been an increasing number of musical and sonic art compositions driven by the data of natural phenomena, some of which are claimed by their authors to be sonifications. This chapter looks at some of the issues surrounding the relationship between sonification and music and at developments that have the potential to draw sonification and the sonic arts into closer union

Sonification abstraite/sonification concrete: An 'aesthetic persepctive space' for classifying auditory displays in the ars musica domain

Presented at the 12th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), London, UK, June 20-23, 2006.This paper discusses æsthetic issues of sonifications and the relationships between sonification (ars informatica) and music & sound art (ars musica). It is posited that many sonifications have suffered from poor internal ecological validity which makes listening more difficult, thereby resulting in poorer data extraction and inference on the part of the listener. Lessons are drawn from the electroacoustic music and musique concrète communities as it is argued that it is not instructive to distinguish between sonifications and music/sound art. Edgard Varèse defined music as organised sound, and sonifications organise sound to reflect mimetically the thing being sonified. Therefore, an æsthetic perspective space onto which sonifications and musical compositions alike can be mapped is proposed. The resultant map allows sonifications to be compared with works in the ars musica domain with which they share characteristics. The æsthetics of those ars musica counterparts can then be interrogated revealing useful design and organisation constructs that can be used to improve the sonifications' communicative ability

Data Sonification in Creative Practice

Sonification is the process of data transmission with non-speech audio. While finding increasing acceptance as a scientific method, particularly where a visual representation of data is inadequate, it is still often derided as a ‘gimmick’. Composers have also shown growing interest in sonification as a compositional method. Both in science and in music, the criticism towards this method relates to poor aesthetics and gratuitous applications. This thesis aims to address these issues through an accompanying portfolio of pieces which use sonification as a compositional tool. It establishes the principles of ‘musification’, which can be defined as a sonification which uses musical structures; a sonification organised by musical principles. The practice-as-research portfolio explores a number of data sources, musical genres and science-music collaborations. The main contributions to knowledge derived from the project are a portfolio of compositions, a compositional framework for sonification and an evaluation framework for musification. This thesis demonstrates the validity of practice-as-research as a methodology in sonification research

Sonification as a means to generative music

This thesis examines the use of sonification (the transformation of non-musical data into sound) as a means of creating generative music (algorithmic music which is evolving in real time and is of potentially infinite length). It consists of a portfolio of ten works where the possibilities of sonification as a strategy for creating generative works is examined. As well as exploring the viability of sonification as a compositional strategy toward infinite work, each work in the portfolio aims to explore the notion of how artistic coherency between data and resulting sound is achieved – rejecting the notion that sonification for artistic means leads to the arbitrary linking of data and sound. In the accompanying written commentary the definitions of sonification and generative music are considered, as both are somewhat contested terms requiring operationalisation to correctly contextualise my own work. Having arrived at these definitions each work in the portfolio is documented. For each work, the genesis of the work is considered, the technical composition and operation of the piece (a series of tutorial videos showing each work in operation supplements this section) and finally its position in the portfolio as a whole and relation to the research question is evaluated. The body of work is considered as a whole in relation to the notion of artistic coherency. This is separated into two main themes: the relationship between the underlying nature of the data and the compositional scheme and the coherency between the data and the soundworld generated by each piece

Turning Gigabytes into Gigs: “Songification” and Live Music Data

Complex data is challenging to understand when it is represented as written communication even when it is structured in a table. How- ever, choosing to represent data in creative ways can aid our under- standing of complex ideas and patterns. In this regard, the creative industries have a great deal to offer data-intensive scholarly disci- plines. Music, for example, is not often used to interpret data, yet the rhythmic nature of music lends itself to the representation and anal- ysis of temporal data.Taking the music industry as a case study, this paper explores how data about historical live music gigs can be analysed, extend- ed and re-presented to create new insights. Using a unique process called ‘songification’ we demonstrate how enhanced auditory data design can provide a medium for aural intuition. The case study also illustrates the benefits of an expanded and inclusive view of research; in which computation and communication, method and media, in combination enable us to explore the larger question of how we can employ technologies to produce, represent, analyse, deliver and exchange knowledge