Spin Quartets. Sonification of the XY Model

Presented at the 16th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2010) on June 9-15, 2010 in Washington, DC.We present an intuitive sonification of data from a statistical physics model, the XY-spin model. Topological structures (anti-/vortices) are hidden to the eye by random spin movement. The behavior of the vortices changes by crossing a phase transition as a function of the temperature. Our sonification builds on basic acoustic properties of phase modulation. Only interesting structures like anti-/vortices remain heard, while everything else falls silent, without additional computational effort. The researcher interacts with the data by a graphical user interface. The sonification can be extended to any lattice model where locally turbulent structures are embedded in rather laminar fields