From Sonification to Sound Art and Music: The interaction of usefulness and aesthetics.

Although scientific data is most often displayed visually, it can often be just as advantageous to sonify data instead. Many problems about sense modalities are thus raised: what we are trained to perceive as useful information, how we can train ourselves to perceive information, how different aspects of information may be emphasized. The author was approached by the team from the Wollongong Room Calorimeter, headed by Associate Professor Arthur Jenkins, and asked if he would like to sonify data produced by the project. This paper follows the course of that work, with many sound and visual examples, discussing the problems involved in sonification, and the many areas where sonification crosses over into the aesthetic realm of sound art and music. One dimensional sonification, a series of pitches on a pulse, gives way to more complex realizations, which draw on ideas from fractal mathematics, such as canons of melodies in which pitch, duration and loudness are all determined by data. The crucial role of timbre will also be discussed: it often influences whether a sound is heard as “musical”, as well as aiding in the useful representation of data. The final outcome of the research is a musical composition, written with interactive software which allows one to explore the music inherent in the interaction of scientific data and musical creativity