CircoSonic: a sonification of CIRCOS, a circular graph of pair wise table data

Abstract

This paper presents, applies and evaluates “CircoSonic,” an interactive sonification of “Circos.” It outlines the development of modifying a gaming engine to replicate Circos, a circular graph for comparing pair wise relationships in a 2D data table, with the added capabilities of sonification through interaction. The developed prototype is evaluated using an insight based methodology and uses a static dataset of historic, current and projected water availability of the Murray Darling Basin. A muted version of CircoSonic is used in the evaluation to establish a baseline comparison of visualization to visualization, from which a projected comparison can be made for visualization to visualization and sonification. In general Circos was found to outperform CircoSonic, except in the aspect of generating complex insights which referred to contextual knowledge. It is concluded that a move from static to dynamic data may show different results and that further investigation is needed into the sonification of novel visualizations.