Sonify the Satellites: Auditory Display of Geospatial Data
Abstract
Auditory display, in which data is mapped to musically-engineered sound, is here proposed as an innovative technique for the analysis and exploration of complex geospatial data sets. This project addresses the specific need for technology solutions that will assist in the analysis and interpretation of Sun-Earth Science data and decision support tools for land, air and water issues. Until now, processing of remotely-sensed data sets to knowledge products for perception and decision-making has been executed primarily through scientific analysis, aggregation and visual display. Visual displays, however, are limited in the number of dimensions available for data. Furthermore, even when knowledge products derived from remote sensing data (vegetation indices or other vegetation modeling results) are used, a formidable task remains to correlate vegetation information in each pixel with climactic and anthropogenic drivers, using only visual displays. The authors describe a collaborative project for applying existing auditory display and headphone spatialization technologies together with a validation procedure using an existing and well-understood geospatial data set, and psychological testing, to evaluate quantitatively the efficacy of auditory display as a technology for analyzing geospatial data sets. Additional projects in the sonification of severe weather data, computational fluid dynamic data and complex financial data will be presented as illustrative examples.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2005
- Bibcode:
- 2005AGUFMED43B0853C
- Keywords:
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- 0800 EDUCATION