Temporal Perspective from Auditory Perception

Baier G, Hermann T. Temporal Perspective from Auditory Perception. In: Vrobel S, Rössler OE, Marks-Tarlow T, eds. Simultaneity: Temporal Structures and Observer Perspectives. Singapore: World Scientific; 2008: 348-363.Dynamically complex diseases with distributed and multi-scale interacting physiological rhythms require a more refined temporal perspective of the scientific observer than is currently provided by visual displays of physiological data. We argue that sonification, the auditory inspection of experimental data, provides a unique approach to the representation of the temporal aspects of the data as it addresses the human sense of listening. The ear's capacity to detect temporal patterns of sameness and differences, of coincidence and coordination - widely exploited in listening to music and spoken language -creates a new temporal perspective in the scientific observer. We briefly describe some examples of sonifications of biomedical data and discuss their value in recovering the temporality of complex physiological processes. Auditory Gestalt formation can be exploited for the classification and differentiation of diseases. Finally, we stress the complementarity of auditory and visual representations and argue for combined audio-visual displays in order to adequately deal with complex phenomena, as in the case of dynamical diseases