Responsive Sonification of Well-logs
                           

Stephen Barrass                     
CSIR O Mathematical and Information Sciences          
GPO Box 664                       
Canberra, ACT, Australia 2601               
Telephone: +61 2 6216 7000         
Fax: +61 2 6216 7111           
stephen.barrass@cmis.csiro.au               
Bjr n Zehner                     
GMD German National Research Center               
for Information Technology                
Schloss Birlinghoven                  
D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany                
bjoern.zehner@gmd.de                   

ABSTRACT                                                                               
Our goal is to apply and evaluate sonication for oil and gas exploration on a Responsive Workbench. The end-users are geological
interpreters who build up models of underground formations, and stake holders in a consortium of oil and gas companies, 
software vendors, and Virtual Environments researchers. Based on the goals and users we formulated development
criteria that the sonication should be easy to explain, quick to understand, useful and usable. The development is based on a
scenario of interpreting a reservoir from multi-attribute well logs. The scenario helped us identify a Geiger-counter metaphor
that is congruent with the domain and familiar to most users. The psychoacoustic design of the Virtual Geiger allows several
logs to be heard together so that listeners may answer higher level questions about relations between logs. The Virtual Geiger
has been demonstrated to hundreds of people at oil and gas summits and review meetings. Many who tried it have made suggestions
for further sonifications. The consortium voted to continue work on sonification in the second round of the project.
The work described here is supported by a demonstration video.                          

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