Meeting the Supervisors

During my stay in Germany in September I came to Darmstadt to meet the supervisors of my project , Torsten Fröhlich and Thorsten Greiner. The meeting was very productive, providing lots of feedback and new trains of thought. All take aways from this meeting are summarized in the next paragraphs:

First of all, it is important for the project to classify all the data that is used. As the intent of the sonification project is to create an audible language to translate the data, it is necessary to clearly identify all types of data being used, to be able to create a meaningful and understandable translation process. 

For the research, escaping a tunnel vision but viewing the entire topic from a more open perspective has been advised. As the project already focuses on a specific use case, this is indeed a danger for the research process and would limit the varieties of the possible outcomes of this research project.
Creating a hierarchy of all important and relevant papers about ambient displays and data sonification to get a clear overview on the current state of the entire research being conducted in those fields has also been suggested.

Other topics that had been discussed in detail were mathematics and statistics. Before transforming data to sound, it is important to know what the actual insight is, that the user would like to receive from those values. Are those particular values the values that the user is interested in, or is it the actually amount of increase/decrease of the value, or maybe only the values that exceed the standard deviation and the amount it exceeds the variance. Transforming the raw data into a more insightful and meaningful data streams is absolutely vital for a successful data sonification as meaningless raw data streams are hard to interpret, visually and especially acoustically. Creating the first and second derivation of the signal, as well as investigating the signal's variance would be the initial path for this. To put this into practice, the software Mathematica and Math Lab will be investigated, as well as the programming language R.

Additionally, lots of input on the sound design has been given, such as considering the use of overtones in the sonification's sound design, thinking about changing and altering the sound design over time as the business day passes by, as well as investigating classical approaches on acoustical representations, such as Sergei Prokofjew's Peter and the Wolf or Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky (among others).

Thank you Torsten Fröhlich and Thorsten Greiner for the great support!