Auditory Display : Sonification, Audification, And Auditory Interfaces

The blessing of the information age is that doctors, scientists, and researchers of all kinds have more information at their disposal than they have ever had before.

The curse of the information age is that all this generated data has led to overload, the result being that data now serves to confuse almost as much as it clarifies.

One method for dealing with this overwhelming amount of data is to display it in one form or another, and the most popular way of displaying data in recent years has been through visualization techniques, e.g., graphs, bar diagrams, time series plots, etc.

These techniques have been extremely useful. However, they have their limitations, and researchers are now exploring alternative methods.

One of the most promising types of new methods is the subject of this important volume.We frequently fail to appreciate how adept people are at interpreting sounds, especially very subtle ones.

Recognizing the strength of the auditory sense, researchers have been developing tools that promise to be useful in real-time applications, from the monitoring of hospital operating rooms to the stress-filled task of air traffic control.

Now, sonification (the display of data through sound) provides new tools for recognizing patterns and analyzing data, extending the process of discovery in such diverse fields as parallel computer programming, geophysics, financial market analysis, and computational fluid dynamics.