Editing Sonification (section)

==History==
The [[Geiger counter]], invented in 1908, is one of the earliest and most successful applications of sonification. A Geiger counter has a tube of low-pressure gas; each particle detected produces a pulse of current when it ionizes the gas, producing an audio click. The original version was only capable of detecting alpha particles. In 1928, [[Hans Geiger|Geiger]] and [[Walther Müller]] (a PhD student of Geiger) improved the counter so that it could detect more types of ionizing radiation.

In 1913, Dr. [[Edmund Fournier d'Albe]] of [[University of Birmingham]] invented the [[optophone]], which used [[selenium]] photosensors to detect black print and convert it into an audible output.<ref>{{Citation
| title = On a Type-Reading Optophone
| journal = [[Proceedings of the Royal Society of London]]
| first = E. E. | last = Fournier d'Albe
|date=May 1914
}}</ref> A blind reader could hold a book up to the device and hold an apparatus to the area she wanted to read. The optophone played a set group of notes: {{Not a typo|g c' d' e' g' b' c'' e''}}. Each note corresponded with a position on the optophone's reading area, and that note was silenced if black ink was sensed. Thus, the missing notes indicated the positions where black ink was on the page and could be used to read.

Pollack and Ficks published the first perceptual experiments on the transmission of information via auditory display in 1954.<ref>{{Citation|title=Information of elementary multidimensional auditory displays|author1=Pollack, I.|author2=Ficks, L.|name-list-style=amp|journal=Journal of the Acoustical Society of America|volume=26|page=136 |doi=10.1121/1.1917759|year=1954|issue=1|bibcode=1954ASAJ...26Q.136P|doi-access=free}}</ref> They experimented with combining sound dimensions such as timing, frequency, loudness, duration, and spatialization and found that they could get subjects to register changes in multiple dimensions at once. These experiments did not get into much more detail than that, since each dimension had only two possible values.

In 1970, [[Nonesuch Records]] released a new electronic music composition by the American composer [[Charles Dodge (composer)|Charles Dodge]], "The Earth's Magnetic Field." It was produced at the [[Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center]]. As the title suggests, the composition's electronic sounds were synthesized from data from the earth's magnetic field.  As such, it may well be the first sonification of scientific data for artistic, rather than scientific, purposes.<ref>{{Citation |author1=Dodge, C.
 | title = The Earth's Magnetic Field.
 | volume = Nonesuch Records-H-71250
 | year = 1970
 | url = https://archive.org/details/lp_earths-magnetic-field_charles-dodge
 }}</ref>

[[John Chambers (statistician)|John M. Chambers]], [[Max Mathews]], and F.R. Moore at [[Bell Laboratories]] did the earliest work on auditory graphing in their "Auditory Data Inspection" technical memorandum in 1974.<ref>{{cite tech report |mode=cs2
 |author=Chambers, J. M. |author2=Mathews, M. V. |author3=Moore, F. R
 |publisher=AT&T Bell Laboratories
 | title = Auditory Data Inspection
 | year = 1974
 |type=Technical Memorandum
 |id=74-1214-20
}}</ref> 
They augmented a [[Scatter plot|scatterplot]] using sounds that varied along frequency, spectral content, and amplitude modulation dimensions to use in classification. They did not do any formal assessment of the effectiveness of these experiments.<ref name = "Frysinger2005">{{Citation
 | chapter = A brief history of auditory data representation to the 1980s
 | title = Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Auditory Display
 | editor = Brazil, Eoin
 | year = 2005
 | pages = 410–413
 | chapter-url = http://www.icad.org/Proceedings/2005/Frysinger2005.pdf
 | author = Frysinger, S. P.
}}</ref>

In 1976, philosopher of technology, Don Ihde, wrote, "Just as science seems to produce an infinite set of visual images for virtually all of its phenomena--atoms to galaxies are familiar to us from coffee table books to science magazines; so 'musics,' too, could be produced from the same data that produces visualizations."<ref>{{Cite book |isbn = 978-0-7914-7256-9|title = Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, Second Edition|last1 = Ihde|first1 = Don|date = 2007-10-04|page=xvi| publisher=SUNY Press }}</ref> This appears to be one of the earliest references to sonification as a creative practice.

In early 1982 Sara Bly of the University of California, Davis, released two publications - with examples - of her work on the use of computer-generated sound to present data. At the time, the field of scientific visualization was gaining momentum. Among other things, her studies and the accompanying examples compared the properties between visual and aural presentation, demonstrating that "Sound offers and enhancement and an alternative to graphic tools." Her work provides early experiment-based data to help inform matching appropriate data representation to type and purpose.
<ref>{{Citation |author1=Bly, S.
 | title = Sound and Computer Information Presentation
 | volume = Ph.D. Thesis
 | institution = University of California, Davis
 | pages = 1–127
 | year = 1982
 | doi = 10.2172/5221536
 | url = https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5221536
| doi-access = free
 | osti = 5221536
 }}</ref>
<ref>{{cite conference |mode=cs2 |author1=Bly, S.
 |title=Presenting information in sound
 |book-title=Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '82
 | pages = 371–375
 | doi = 10.1145/800049.801814
| doi-access = free
 }}</ref>

Also in the 1980s, [[pulse oximeter]]s came into widespread use. Pulse oximeters can sonify oxygen concentration of blood by emitting higher pitches for higher concentrations. However, in practice this particular feature of pulse oximeters may not be widely utilized by medical professionals because of the risk of too many audio stimuli in medical environments.<ref>
{{Citation |author1=Craven, R M |author2=McIndoe, A K
 | title = Continuous auditory monitoring—how much information do we register?
 | volume = 83
 | issue = 5
 | pages = 747–749
 | year = 1999
 | doi = 10.1093/bja/83.5.747|pmid=10690137
 | url = http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/content/83/5/747.full.pdf
 | journal = British Journal of Anaesthesia
| doi-access = free
 }}{{dead link|date=May 2021|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}</ref>

In 1990, the [[National Center for Supercomputing Applications]] began generating scientific data sonifications and visualizations from the same source data and a paper describing this work was presented at the June 1991 [[SPIE]] Conference on Extracting Meaning from Complex Data.<ref>
{{Citation |author1=Scaletti, C |author2=Craig, A B
 | title = Using sound to extract meaning from complex data
 | volume = 1459
 | year = 1991
 | doi = 10.1117/12.44397
 | url = https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/1459/1/Using-sound-to-extract-meaning-from-complex-data/10.1117/12.44397.short
 | journal = Proc. SPIE 1459, Extracting Meaning from Complex Data: Processing, Display, Interaction II
 |page=207
 |bibcode=1991SPIE.1459..207S
 | url-access = subscription
 }}</ref> Included in the supporting information for the paper was a video, winner of the 1991 Nicograph Multimedia Grand Prize, comprising several data visualizations paired with their corresponding data sonifications.

In 1992, the [[International Community for Auditory Display]] (ICAD) was founded by [[Gregory Kramer]] as a forum for research on [[auditory display]] which includes data sonification. ICAD has since become a home for researchers from many different disciplines interested in the use of sound to convey information through its conference and peer-reviewed proceedings.<ref>
{{Citation
| title=Sound science: Marking ten international conferences on auditory display
| author1=Kramer, G. |author2=Walker, B.N.
| s2cid=1187647
| journal=ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
| volume=2
| issue=4
| citeseerx = 10.1.1.88.7945
| pages=383–388
| year=2005
| doi=10.1145/1101530.1101531
}}</ref>

In 2020, the composer [[Simon James Gray (Composer)|Simon Gray]] recording as The Winterval Conspiracy produced a sonification of the [[SARS-Cov-2]] virus responsible for the [[Covid-19 pandemic]] in the form of a musical [[fugue]].<ref>{{cite web|title=Fugue in MN908947, for Li Wenliang|url= https://thewintervalconspiracy.bandcamp.com/track/fugue-in-mn908947-for-li-wenliang |website=winterval.org.uk|access-date=15 March 2025}}</ref>

In May 2022, NASA reported the sonification (converting astronomical data associated with [[Longitudinal wave|pressure waves]] into [[sound]]) of the black hole at the center of the [[Perseus Cluster|Perseus galaxy cluster]].<ref name="NASA-20220504">{{cite news |last1=Watzke |first1=Megan |last2=Porter |first2=Molly |last3=Mohon |first3=Lee |title=New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix |url=https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/new-nasa-black-hole-sonifications-with-a-remix.html |date=4 May 2022 |work=[[NASA]] |access-date=11 May 2022 }}</ref><ref name="NYT-20220507">{{cite news |last=Overbye |first=Dennis |author-link=Dennis Overbye |title=Hear the Weird Sounds of a Black Hole Singing - As part of an effort to "sonify" the cosmos, researchers have converted the pressure waves from a black hole into an audible … something.|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/science/space/astronomy-black-hole-sound.html  |date=7 May 2022 |work=[[The New York Times]] |access-date=11 May 2022 }}</ref>

In 2024, [[9 Horses#Adhyâropa Records|Adhyâropa Records]] released ''The Volcano Listening Project'' by Leif Karlstrom, which merges geophysics research and computer music synthesis with acoustic instrumental and vocal performances by [[Billy Contreras]], [[Todd Sickafoose]], and other acoustic musicians.<ref>{{cite web|title=The Volcano Listening Project|url=https://volcanolisteningproject.org|website=volcanolisteningproject.org|access-date=16 September 2024}}</ref>