31–40 of 42 posts
Book on the subject: Gregory Kramer - "Auditory Display - Sonification, Audification and Auditory Interfaces"
Thanks, ordered. There's a substantial body of research in this area, and we're just becoming conversant with it now.
The problem I see from the GitHub demo and the discussion here is that you zone out of the "background noise" and focus on the important/out-of-bound/etc sounds. Great, so why not just remove the background sounds and just alert the user to an urgent notification. There's nothing new to this, however, this is just audible notification alerts.
If you are going to run the sounds in the background, your brain is going to process out the on-going "normal" sound anyway.
Very interesting and highly creative. A few thoughts. 1) If a graphical plot turns data into something visual, an audio "plot" turns data into something audible. Your output is an audio file rather than an image or video file. The typical applications of this are to turn a boolean flag into a chime (e.g. text message received). Your important insight is that this can be extended to longer-form audio outputs. 2) When…
What I think would be a useful addition would be transforming 'levels' (as opposed to events) to ambient, continuously-playing audio. This is pretty much the "dynamic audio" of computer games.
For example, you could have strings playing according to CPU activity: softly and slowly (think double basses) when activity is low, but more loudly and urgently (cellos) when activity is high. That would create a sense of how busy the server is (if you enable the CPU activity 'channel').
edit: I see cortesi has already mentioned they're working on transforming continuous data now - good job.
Very interesting and highly creative. A few thoughts. 1) If a graphical plot turns data into something visual, an audio "plot" turns data into something audible. Your output is an audio file rather than an image or video file. The typical applications of this are to turn a boolean flag into a chime (e.g. text message received). Your important insight is that this can be extended to longer-form audio outputs. 2) When…
Have a look at my co-conspirator's blog post about Choir: http://alexdong.com/choir-dot-io-explained/ We definitely see Choir fitting in where you can't look at or interact with a screen. Cars and wearable computing are areas we're excited about. First, though, we want to experiment on the desktop, find out what makes a good audio interface, and solve our own burning needs regarding more mundane monitoring situations…
Either way, looks like your signup-form has some peculiar ideas about what constitutes an email address, it keeps asking me to input an email address when I type in:
choir.io@s.hypertekst.netHowever, it is in no sense "new or unique" as the authors suggest. Extensive (20+ years) of research literature on data sonification is out there, so...
http://www.icad.org/knowledgebase
Note also (very many) art-led sonification projects, turning everything from live IP traffic to gene-sequence or x-ray astronomy datasets, carried out since the early 90s. Prix Ars Electronica may be a good place to look for these.
My summary of the field in general, FWIW, is this - it's trivial to turn a realtime data stream into sound. It's slightly harder to turn the stream into either a) music or b) non-dissonant sound streams, and it's very hard indeed to create a legible (ie useful, reversible) general purpose sonification framework, because auditory discrimination abilities vary so widely from individual to individual and are highly context-dependent.
Of course, because sound exists in time not space, there's no simple back-comparison of data with and relative to itself, as when one looks at a visual graph. Listeners rely on shaky old human memory: did I hear that before? Was it lower, louder? And so on.
That said, I remain fascinated by the area and propose that a sonic markup language for the web would be interesting.
Sneaky plug: My current project (http://chirp.io) began by looking at 'ambient alerts' until we reached the point above, and decided to put machine-readable data into sound, instead of attaching sound to data for humans.
Good luck, and I very much look forward to hearing more!
Ok, I'm going to say it -- I don't get it. The problem I see from the GitHub demo and the discussion here is that you zone out of the "background noise" and focus on the important/out-of-bound/etc sounds. Great, so why not just remove the background sounds and just alert the user to an urgent notification. There's nothing new to this, however, this is just audible notification alerts. If you are going to run the soun…
E.g. if you know a co-worker is on holidays then a dearth of checkin sounds will seem normal (ideally this feeling of normalcy will be subconscious). On a different day, a dearth of checkin sounds might alert you that your startup isn't making much coding progress (depending on context not necessarily a bad thing!).
This is an excellent project, congrats. However, it is in no sense "new or unique" as the authors suggest. Extensive (20+ years) of research literature on data sonification is out there, so... http://www.icad.org/knowledgebase Note also (very many) art-led sonification projects, turning everything from live IP traffic to gene-sequence or x-ray astronomy datasets, carried out since the early 90s. Prix Ars Electronica…
That said, what we're trying to do specifically - which is sonification as a service, and trying to adequately cover a very wide range of different use cases and sound sources at once - is probably new. I don't think that matters much, though, and "newness" is the least interesting aspect of the project.
This is an excellent project, congrats. However, it is in no sense "new or unique" as the authors suggest. Extensive (20+ years) of research literature on data sonification is out there, so... http://www.icad.org/knowledgebase Note also (very many) art-led sonification projects, turning everything from live IP traffic to gene-sequence or x-ray astronomy datasets, carried out since the early 90s. Prix Ars Electronica…
I certainly don't want to give the impression that we're unaware of the long history of auditory display projects. In fact, it's my reading in these areas that resulted in this project. Keep an eye on my blog for some posts delving into our antecedents and the research around sound perception soon. That said, what we're trying to do specifically - which is sonification as a service, and trying to adequately cover a v…
wetter reverbs, in particular the late reflections are pretty strong with far-away background noises. maybe even stronger than the original sound itself (though I'm not sure if that makes physical sense, it's easy to do with a regular reverb effect, and really muffles the sound into background)
also something with the stereo image.
if funds allow, ask a professional sound mastering studio, maybe? there's people that might know just the tricks.
oh and if you want to place the sound in the room, bury in the other ambient sounds, tell the users they really need somewhat decent speakers, not plastic desktop speakers and definitely not headphones (even if they're really good headphones).