| This is an excellent project, congrats. However, it is in no sense "new or unique" as the authors suggest. Extensive (20+ years) of research literature on data sonification is out there, so... http://www.icad.org/knowledgebase Note also (very many) art-led sonification projects, turning everything from live IP traffic to gene-sequence or x-ray astronomy datasets, carried out since the early 90s. Prix Ars Electronica may be a good place to look for these. My summary of the field in general, FWIW, is this - it's trivial to turn a realtime data stream into sound. It's slightly harder to turn the stream into either a) music or b) non-dissonant sound streams, and it's very hard indeed to create a legible (ie useful, reversible) general purpose sonification framework, because auditory discrimination abilities vary so widely from individual to individual and are highly context-dependent. Of course, because sound exists in time not space, there's no simple back-comparison of data with and relative to itself, as when one looks at a visual graph. Listeners rely on shaky old human memory: did I hear that before? Was it lower, louder? And so on. That said, I remain fascinated by the area and propose that a sonic markup language for the web would be interesting. Sneaky plug: My current project (http://chirp.io) began by looking at 'ambient alerts' until we reached the point above, and decided to put machine-readable data into sound, instead of attaching sound to data for humans. Good luck, and I very much look forward to hearing more! |
That said, what we're trying to do specifically - which is sonification as a service, and trying to adequately cover a very wide range of different use cases and sound sources at once - is probably new. I don't think that matters much, though, and "newness" is the least interesting aspect of the project.