A comparision of audio & visual analysis of complex time-series data sets
Sandra Pauletto, Andy Hunt · 2005
This paper describes an experiment to compare user understanding of complex data sets presented in two different modalities, a) in a visual spectrogram, and b) via audification. Many complex time-series data sets taken from helicopter flight recordings were presented to the test subjects in both modalities separately. The aim was to see if a key set of attributes (noise, repetitive elements, regular oscillations, discontinuities, and signal power) were discernable to the same degree in the different modalities. Statistically significant correlations were found for all attributes, which shows that audification can be used as an alternative to spectrograms for this type of analysis. 1. CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND This paper describes an experiment to verify that sound can be used as an alternative to graphs in the analysis of complex signals. We have compared a visual and an audio display of the same data sets in order to confirm that certain key attributes are at least as discernable from a complex data set by sonification as by visualization. This verification is important to those projects which aim to use sound representation for data analysis. The world is currently dominated by visual techniques, and many people need to be convinced that information will not somehow be ‘lost’ by representing it as sound. Once that has been established, it becomes a lot easier to stress the advantages of using sound.