Thirteen years of reflection on auditory graphing: Promises, pitfalls, and potential new directions

Presented at the 11th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2005)While developments in sound production hardware now make the creation of auditory graphs possible for casual users of personal computers, some of the same pitfalls to effective auditory display development that arose in the early 1990's continue to impede effective applications of this promising technology. Most of these pitfalls stem from lack of adequate understanding about key properties of auditory perception and attention and from inappropriate generalizations of existing data visualization practices. At the same time, however, we now know about some strategies that appear to work and offer promise for making sonification a useful and accepted tool for data exploration and decision making. The present paper summarizes several selected examples in each of these categories, along some suggestions for future research directions