Data sonification and sound visualization

This article describes a collaborative project between researchers in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the Computer Music Project of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. The project focuses on the use of sound for the exploration and analysis of complex data sets in scientific computing. The article addresses digital sound synthesis in the context of DIASS (Digital Instrument for Additive Sound Synthesis) and sound visualization in a virtual-reality environment by means of M4CAVE. It describes the procedures and preliminary results of some experiments in scientific sonification and sound visualization. While most computational scientists routinely use visual imaging techniques to explore and analyze large data sets, they tend to be much less familiar with the use of sound. Yet, sound signals carry significant amounts of information and can be used advantageously to increase the bandwidth of the human/computer interface. The project described in this article focuses on scientific sonification—the faithful rendering of scientific data in sounds—and the visualization of sounds in a virtual-reality environment. The project, which grew out of an effort to apply the latest supercomputing technology to the process of music composition (see Box 1), is a joint collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory (ANL, Mathematics and Computer Science Division) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, Computer Music Project). Digital sound synthesis is addressed in Section 1; the discussion centers on DIASS (Digital Instrument for Additive Sound Synthesis). Section 2 describes some experiments in scientific sonification. Sound visualization in a virtual-reality (VR) environment is discussed in Section 3; here, the main tool is M4CAVE, a program to visualize sounds from a score file. Section 4 contains some general observations about the project.