today's word is 'sonification'

today's word is sonification, a word i didn't know existed before today. according to wikipedia it's "the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data".

the best-known examples of sonification are the geiger counter, which ticks more frequently as radioactivity increases, and medical equipment that goes ping when things are ok. or in some cases, when everything goes very very wrong.

hmm, interesting. partly because i've seen a bunch of pretty data visualisation recently, much of it via boingboing. and in some ways we can read science as the endeavour to make more and more things visible which weren't.

it's also interesting to me because as someone who uses computers to make and record sound, i spend an awful lot of time working with visual representations of sound. sometimes you can get so used to working with these visualisations of sound that you stop listening, start lining things up and drawing volume curves according to how they look.

anyway, thomas hermann's page has an overview of the field, and sonenvir are working on making a generalised software environment for data sonification. oh, and here's the international community for auditory display. (why did they have to use the word 'display', though? wasn't there a less visual word they could have used?)