The R Programming Language as a Unified Environment for Data Sonification

Abstract

This short article explores the statistical programming environ- ment R as a sonification interface using the add-on package playitbyr, currently in a pre-alpha stage of development. R’s growing and vibrant community of users is a promising audience for sonification tools, and sonification can provide a welcome ad- dition to R’s arsenal of tools for making sense of multidimensional data. playitbyr attempts to provide intuitive functions and data structures for mapping data to sonic parameters, using MIDI or Csound for synthesis.