Sonification of Social Data

Abstract

This paper explores the usefulness of sonification for displaying and analyzing social data. Prototypes for an interactive sonification framework were implemented in the synthesis language SuperCollider2. The authors have experimented with auditory display of aggregate data (executions in the USA, and election results in Austria) and have explored a data matrix of survey respondents. Sonification can increase the awareness for problems in statistical analysis methods, it complements statistics particularly well with lower sample sizes, and it shows promise for multidimensional data analysis.