Exploratory Sound Analysis: Sonifying Data about Sound

Sound is commonly analysed subjectively by listening to it. However, when we want to analyse a sound objectively, we often switch domains, and change to visual or numerical displays. While it is likely that, generally speaking, the visual sense dominates other senses, when the data being explored are sound the question naturally arises as to whether these data may be statistically represented in that same domain. This paper describes and demonstrates a general scheme for building statistical representations of sound that exist entirely within the auditory domain, and use the original audio data to present descriptive data.