I've done about 4 years of research on sonification, which is using non-speech audio to represent patterns in data ( http://mags.acm.org/interactions/20120102/?pg=37#pg37 for some specifics). This article is a subset of sonification in some ways, since we're representing some quantitative data using auditory parameters. There's an entire class of scenarios where conventional HCIs can't represent data for analysis: wh…
No doubt. Years ago, a buddy hosted corporate email, dns, etc. Racks of servers. He added ambient audio to everything he monitored. Nature sounds, weather, birds, insects, etc. The volume, samples, and tempo would change dynamically. Happy soothing sounds when all was well. Disruptive sounds when bad stuff happened. (I don't know if you'd classify that as sonification.) Walking around, visiting with guests, talking o…
What's interesting is that for visual displays, we have decades of detailed research into visual perception - we know from experience how to design a graph so that patterns can be quickly extracted and understood. We don't yet have that same level of understanding for sonifications, but once we do, applications like this will be even better