Auditory presentation of experimental data
David Lunney, Robert C. Morrison · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1990
Our research group has been working for several years on the development of auditory alternatives to visual graphs, primarily in order to give blind science students and scientists access to instrumental measurements. In the course of this work we have tried several modes for auditory presentation of data: synthetic speech, tones of varying pitch, complex waveforms, electronic music, and various non-musical sounds. Our most successful translation of data into sound has been presentation of infrared spectra as musical patterns. We have found that if the stick spectra of two compounds are visibly different, their musical patterns will be audibly different. Other possibilities for auditory presentation of data are also described, among them listening to Fourier transforms of spectra, and encoding data in complex waveforms (including synthetic speech).