A research paper by NASA about Data Sonification

A research paper by NASA about data sonification and its use in the practical field has been studied for further insight into sonification applications in different research areas.
It describes sonification as a tool that "can improve and increase the bandwidth of the interface 'human-computer' and can find a lot of applications in the wide range of information technology."

Furthermore, the strengths and possible features of sonifcation are being pointed out:

• "uncovering patterns masked in visual displays
• identify new phenomena current display techniques miss
• improving data exploration of large multi-dimensianal and multi-dataset
• exploring in frequency rather than spatial dimension
• analyzing complex, rapidly, or temporally changing data
• complementing existing visual displays
• monitoring data while looking at something else (background event finding)
• improving visual perception when accompanied by audio cues"

Background event finding would be the most relevant use case for the Listening to the Heart of Business research project.

In the introductory chapter, the papers provides a very detailed research history of the field of Sonification and points out very interesting early works in this field from the following authors:

• Pollack, I., and L. Ficks. “Information of Elementary MultidimensionalAuditory Display”. J.Acoustic SocietyAmerica (1954)
• Speeth, S. D. “Seismometer Sounds”. J.Acoustic SocietyAmerica (1961)
• Chambers, J. M., M. V. Mathews, and F. R. Moore. “Auditory Data Inspection”. Technical Momorandum no. 74-1214-20,AT&T Bell Laboratories (1974) 
• EdwardYeung, “Auditory Display”. Santa Fe Institute (1994)

Further in the paper, the application xSonify is introduced and explained in much detail and how it can be used for successful data sonfications. The software provides different sonification modi and instruments, also including speech support for blind people. Different data sets can be imported into the application and mapped to different sonification techniques and instruments. After setting everything up, the user hits the play button and can listen to the data. xSonify is one of the most famous sonification applications.

Towards the end, a very interesting piece of work by Sylvain Daude and Laurence Nigay is presented, introducing a sonification process and its data transformation within (from Sylvain Daude, Laurence Nigay, “Design Process For Auditory Interfaces”, Proceedings ICAD 2003).

From Data To Data View: Data Transformation 

(...) the raw data will be mapped value by value into a range of values between0 < x < 1. This process can be considered as a kind of standardization of values whichis necessary to make the data available independent from their unit and scale.

 From Data To Abstract Sound Space: Sonification Transformation

(...) the data are prepared according to the chosen Sonification modus. Every value will be assigned to a certain position at a “time line”. This “time line” isrepresents the time line of the Sonification sequence which will be played (...).

FromAbstract Sound Space To Sonic: Auditory Display Transformation 

(...) where the signal is finally displayed on a physical device.

The picture below visualizes the transformation of the data's journey from raw data to sound.

Sonification Process from the NASA Sonification Paper

At the end of the paper, difficulties and problems regarding sonification are being pointed out:

• low resolution of some auditory variables

• limited spatial precision 

• lack of absolute values 

• absence of persistence 

• no printout

More about NASA's research on sonification can be found here.