The Local Heat Exploration Model for Interactive Sonification
Till Bovermann, Thomas M. Hermann, Helge Joachim Ritter · PUB – Publications at Bielefeld University (Bielefeld University) · 2005
This paper presents a new sonification model for the ex-ploration of topographically ordered high-dimensional data (multi-parameter maps, volume data) where each data item consists of a position and feature vector. The sonification model implements a commonmetaphor from thermodynam-ics that heat can be interpreted as stochastic motion of ’mo-lecules’. The latter are determined by the data under exami-nation, and ’live ’ only in the feature space. Heat-induced interactions cause acoustic events that fuse to a granular sound texture which conveys meaningful information about the underlying distribution in feature space. As a second ingredient of the model, data selection is achieved by a sep-arated navigation process in position space using a dynamic aura model, such that heat can be induced locally. Both, a visual and an auditory display are driven by the underlying model. We exemplify the sonification by means of interac-tion examples for different high-dimensional distributions.