Presented at the 19th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2013) on July 6-9, 2013 in Lodz, Poland.Visitors to aquariums typically rely on their vision to interact
with live exhibits that convey rich descriptive and aesthetic
visual information. However, some visitors may prefer or need to
have an alternative interpretation of the exhibitÕs visual scene to
improve their experience. Musical sonification has been explored
as an interpretive strategy for this purpose and related work
provides some guidance for sonification design, yet more
empirical work on developing and validating the music-to-visual
scene mappings needs to be completed. This paper discusses
work to validate mappings that were developed through an
investigation of musician performances for two specific live
animal exhibits at the Georgia Aquarium. In this proposed study,
participants will provide feedback on musical mapping examples
which will help inform design of a real-time sonification system
for aquarium exhibits. Here, we describe our motivation,
methods, and expected contributions