From: acraig@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Alan Craig)
Subject: Re: Info on "sonification" at University of Illinois?
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1991 17:42:14 GMT
Organization: National Center for Supercomputing Applications



Sonification work at the University of Illinois

In response to Bob Jacobson's question about the sonification work 
taking place at the University of Illinois,  here is what is happening 
to the best of my knowledge.  

I am in the Scientific Visualization group at NCSA and we have been 
collaborating with Carla Scaletti (symbolic.snd@applelink.apple.com) 
from Symbolic Sound.  We have been investigating how sound might 
be used to represent/communicate information.  We are 
investigating different techniques for mapping data into sound, and 
exploring how sound complements visual representation.  We would 
like to learn useful techniques to allow us to use sound to convey 
more information than we can convey visually.  We are trying to 
learn when sound can be used to carry additional information to the 
visual,  and when it is useful to carry redundant information.

The best description of this work would be in a paper titled "Using 
Sound To Extract Meaning from Complex Data" published in The 
proceedings of SPIE  "Extracting Meaning from Complex Data: 
Processing, Display, Interaction II" 1991 San Jose Ed. Farrell SPIE 
Volume 1459 ISBN 0819405582  If anyone would like a copy and 
does not have the proceedings,  they may send me email and I will 
mail them a copy of the paper.  There is also a video which goes 
along with the paper and is in the SPIE video supplement, or may be 
obtained from NCSA for the handling fee.  The video describes some 
of our thought about the use of sound,  shows how we created the 
sounds, and shows some examples of the use of sound.  The platform 
we used for computing the sounds is the Symbolic Sound Kyma 
System which turned out to be a very flexible, comfortable 
environment for doing this kind of work in.

We are also beginning to investigate the role of sound in virtual 
reality.  This will involve the generation of sounds as well as the 
placement of sounds in 3D space.

The software tools group at NCSA is currently incorporating sound 
into some of their workstation visualization tools.  These allow for 
the interactive probing of datasets/images with sound probes, as 
well as some other handy features.  For further information on these 
tools,  contact Robin Bargar rbargar@ncsa.uiuc.edu or Laura Kalman 
lkalman@ncsa.uiuc.edu.  In addition, Robin and Laura are initiating 
research to determine user-responses to various types of acoustic 
and audio-visual software environments. Robin is also conducting 
work in the NCSA Numerical Labs, regarding user-interactive sound 
synthesis environments, and representations of 3D space using 
sound.

Feel free to contact me by email or telephone if you have further 
questions.

Alan Craig
NCSA Visualization Group
(217) 244-1988