Orchestration within the Sonification of basic Data Sets                                            

Charlie Cullen    						Eugene Coyle                                                                                             
Conservatory of Music                                 School of Control Systems & Electrical Engineering                    
Dublin Institute of Technology                        Dublin Institute of Technology                                        
Rathmines Road, Dublin, Ireland                       Kevin Street, Dublin, Ireland                                         
charlie.cullen@dit.ie                                 eugene.coyle@dit.ie                                                                                                                                               

ABSTRACT
The use of sonification as a means of representing and          
analysing data has become a growing field of research in recent                                                             
years and as such has become a far more accepted means of                                                                   
working with data. Existing work carried out as part of this    
research has focused primarily on the sonification of                                                                       
DNA/RNA sequences and their subsequent protein structures       
for the purposes of analysis. This sonification work raised many
questions as regards the need for sequences to be set to music in                                                           
a standard manner so that different strands could be analysed by
comparison, and hence the orchestration and instrumentation     
used became of great importance.                                                                                            
The basic principles of sonification can be rapidly extended to 
include many different data elements within a single rendering,                                                             
and thus the importance of orchestration grows accordingly.     
Existing work on the use of rhythmic parsing within a                                                                       
sonification had suggested that far more information could be                                                               
represented when orchestrated in a rhythmic manner than when                                                                
simply reconstituted in single musical block. The principle was                                                             
further extended to include the allocation specific instruments                                                             
and pitches within rhythmic patterns so that each sonic event                                                               
would convey the data it was intended to represent. To this end                                                             
a fictional database of employees in a company was created as a                                                             
means of developing the principles required for more effective                                                              
sonification through orchestration.                                                                                         
The employee database was intended as a means of using a                                                                    
straightforward data set to analyse the effect of basic changes in                                                          
instrumentation and orchestration rather than the data itself. The                                                          
allocation of chord intervals or melodies to different data                                                                 
elements allowed the data to be represented in different ways at 
output in order that these differences would eventually highlight                                                           
some form of framework for effective sonification of data sets  
with multiple elements.                                         


REFERENCES                                
[1] Orchestration, Walter Piston, W.W Norton & Company,         
ISBN 0-393-09740-4                                         
[2] Rhythmic Parsing of Sonified DNA and RNA Sequences,         
Charlie Cullen and Eugene Coyle, ISSC2003 Limerick.        
[3] Database Systems 3    Edition (pg79), Thomas Connolly       
and Carolyn Begg, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-70857-4       
[4] The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2           
edition volume 12, Macmillan Publishers ltd 2001, ISBN     
0-333-60800-3                                              
[5] The AB Guide to Music Theory Parts 1&2, Eric Taylor,      
ABRSM Publishing, ISBN 1-85472-446-0 