Tangible computing for interactive sonification of multivariate data

We present a novel tangible computing system for interactively controlling real-time and offline data sonifications. Tangible ob-jects serve as physical correlates for data series such as EEG chan-nels, and their arrangement on our Tangible Desk (tDesk) surface is used to interactively explore features of interest in the real-time rendered sonifications. A listener object and its distances to chan-nel objects are used to select how salient the channels ’ sonic rep-resentation is in the overall sonification. Selector objects serve for the specification of datasets. This interface enables the user (a) to identify groups of correlated rhythmical behavior, (b) to control multiple channels simultaneously, and (c) to explore the data col-laboratively in a team. We give a full account on hard-/software of the system and we demonstrate the system at hand of offline- and real-time sonification of EEG and stock market data