An interactive approach for teaching information sonification

Abstract

Teaching sonification is interdisciplinary and multifaceted. It includes areas such as information graphing, auditory parameters for representation, psychoacoustics affected by the context and combination of parameters, auditory cognition, programming and foundational synthesis or sound production. The interactive pedagogical method presented here fuses these elements in a real-time interactive environment for learning and experimentation in order to familiarise students with basic concepts and develop an understanding of the interdependencies. It allows the student to listen and interact with instructive examples, quickly evaluate the efficacy of different display possibilities, move through the material at their own pace, investigate further online reading lists, and eventually helps them build their own sonifications. This paper describes pedagogical software that integrates these disciplines.