Personify a toolkit for perceptually meaningful sonification

Stephen Barrass
stephen.barrass@cbr.dit.csiro.au
CSIRO Division of Information Technology, GPO Box 664, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia


ABSTRACT
People naturally use their hearing to obtain information to support their everyday activities. Sonification is the application
of hearing to support computer based information processing tasks where numerical or other data replaces the
environment as a source of sounds. Turning numbers into sounds is easy with current music technology. But creating
intuitive and informative sonification mappings is not. The auditory display of scientific data requires consideration of the
task at hand, an understanding of data characteristics, and an expert knowledge of psychoacoustics. The display designer
must depend on experience, a few heuristic guidelines, patience and luck - this is why successful examples are rare.
Personify is a suite of software tools which enable a non-expert to quickly and easily craft meaningful and effective
sonifications. Interaction with these tools is focused on what a person hears, rather than on how a device makes sounds.
The toolkit provides a systematic framework which consists of a number of data sensitive mapping techniques based on a
perceptually linearised sound space. The user is able to select sequences in the sound space using geometric paths such as
lines, spirals and planes. Constrained guidance embodies the expert knowledge in the system.
This paper will describe the Personify toolkit, its purpose, theoretical foundation, the component tools, and the multimedia
user interface.                                        



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