Sonification of Physical Quantities throughout History: a Meta-study of Previous Mapping Strategies

We introduce a meta-study of previous sonification designs taking physical quantities as input data. The aim is to build a solid foundation for future sonification works so that auditory display researchers would be able to take benefit from former studies, avoiding to start from scratch when beginning new sonification projects. This work is at an early stage and the objective of this paper is rather to introduce the methodology than to come to definitive conclusions. After a historical introduction, we explain how to collect a large amount of articles and extract useful information about mapping strategies. Then, we present the physical quantities grouped according to conceptual dimensions, as well as the sound parameters used in sonification designs and we summarize the current state of the study by listing the couplings extracted from the article database. A total of 54 articles have been examined for the present article. Finally, a preliminary analysis of the results is performed.