Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to represent data (Kramer et al., 1997).
A popular link for sonification comes from the Web Science domain: Hatnote’s Listen to Wikipedia.
Audification is the “direct data translation of a data waveform to the audible domain for purposes of monitoring and comprehension” (Kramer, 1994). The process can be refined to mapping a data signal to an amplitude (Dombois and Eckel, 2011).
We might think of instruments like a seismographs or Geiger counters. Audification is useful is time is an immediate concern.
An example comes from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiments or Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (2016).
Musification is the application of musical terms, such polyphony, to the representation (Coop, 2016).
The boundaries between these and sonification are some what porous.
Parameter-Based Sonification, the association of the information with an audio parameter, is used for readings of static objects to create sonic readings that respond to a specific stimulus from the data (Grond and Berger, 2016)
Model-Based Sonification is where models create and drive the processes but without making sound until receiving an interaction, describes a system’s evolution and moves away from input / output towards an object that develops in response to human- or machine-driven processes (Hermann, 2016).
Coop, A.D., 2016. “Sonification, Musification, and Synthesis of Absolute Program Music” In: The 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD–2016) , Jul y 2-8, Canberra, Australia, https://doi.org/10.21785/icad2016.030
Dombois, F. and Eckel, G. 2011. “Audification” in Hermann, T., Hunt, A., Neuhoff, J. G., editors, The Sonification Handbook, chapter 12, pages 301-324. Logos Publishing House, Berlin, Germany.
Grond, F. and J. Berger, J., 2011., “Parameter mapping sonification,” in Hermann, T., Hunt, A., and J. Neuhoff, J. (eds.) The Sonification Handbook, Logos Publishing House, Berlin, Germany
Hermann, T. and Ritter, H., 1999. Listen to your data: Model-based sonification for data analysis. Advances in intelligent computing and multimedia systems, 8, pp.189-194.
Kramer, G. 1994. Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
Kramer, G., Walker, B., Bonebright, T., Cook, P., Flowers, J., Miner, N., & Neuhoff, J. 1997. Sonification Report: Status of the Field and Research Agenda. Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/psychfacpub/444
Levin, J., 2016. Black hole blues and other songs from outer space. Anchor.
Walker, B.N. and Nees, M.A., 2011. Theory of sonification. In Hermann, T., Hunt, A., Neuhoff, J. G., editors, The Sonification Handbook, chapter 12, pages 301-324. Logos Publishing House, Berlin, Germany.