Sonification Review

I went into Chris Chafte’s lecture on Sonification expecting a primarily experimental music focus without much use for the concept in practice.  What I experienced though was quite the opposite.  Chris started his talk with the start of his own career at the CCRMA, or “Karma” as it’s commonly referred to, at Stanford.  This was a great pick for the start of his lecture because it allowed us to understand the concepts of Sonification with less complicated examples at first.  He explained that Sonification is the process of taking some data, it could be something as simple as a person’s steps to get to work, and assigning different variables different sounds.  Then the magic comes when these sounds are combined to create the final dataset. 

The first example he showed us was created by one of his colleagues at CCRMA where they took a game of “Towers of Hanoi” and used a percussive beat to signify each move.  As the game progressed the beats increased in tempo and then eventually died off as the game came to an end.  Even though the lecture started with a small foray into the world of Sonification, it wasn’t till now that I was able to understand and appreciate the idea.  I enjoyed knowing what I was listening to, and having some background information before I heard the data.

My main question of Sonification’s use in data analyzing came when Chris talked about how it is used in medical science.  Currently there are people working with Sonification in hospitals to diagnose and treat people with seizures in much faster time period than a standard EKG and operate.  Chris explained that a standard EKG can take up to 30 minutes to process and return results to help doctors properly treat the patient, at which time it could be too late.  Now though there is a system where the doctor can use a sensor array around the patient’s head to, in real time, hear the person’s heart rate and neurons firing.  Another example of an application where Sonification has had a major impact on the scientists’ ability to read data is actually in the Arctic circles.  Researchers are extracting long cores of ice from the polar ice caps to analyze the air bubbles trapped within them.  This data is then changed into a form that the scientists can hear to analyze the atmospheric aspects of the air bubble.  This second example was more confusing for me, I didn’t quite see the use of Sonification here. 

The coolest application, in my opinion, was how some researchers were able to digitally create the sound from the Hagia Sofia.  They went to the famous concert hall and popped a balloon to record how the sound traveled through the space.  Then they took that data and were, in real time, able to digitally recreate the correct the echo in a studio.  This is amazing to me, because I’ve always preferred seeing live concerts because the sound is much fuller, and this could be the answer to this. 

I left the lecture quite interested in Sonification as a whole, but mainly this last point.  I’m curious if, in the future, we will see some recording studios using this technology to make records that sound live but aren’t to get that distinct difference in sound.

- Zachary Schaller

November 1, 2018