Sonification Listening: An Empirical Embodied Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a sonification listening model built from models of embodied cognitive meaning-making faculties. The aim of such a model is to aid in understanding how meaning is applied to auditory stimuli at the cognitive level.this in trun can aid auditory display designers in creating more effective auditory displays. The concept of ‘scale’ in sonification is considered in relation to the faculties described in the model. An experiment that explores how embodied auditory cognition, as described by the model, understands and interprets sonifications is then presented. This examining two speciffic kinds of ‘scale models’ listeners employ to interpret a sonification. The results obtained from this experiment are particularly convincing showing that a listeners knowledge of the data-set being sonified will determine how they interpret changes in the auditory stimuli in a sonification. The existence of these scale models, the impact of a listeners knowledge on their perception of a sonification and the implications imposed by the embodied nature of auditory cognition suggest a new avenue for auditory display researchers interested in devloping meaningful sonifications that explit the embodied nature of auditory cognitio