examples, please

[Marsha Woodbury]

I would sure appreciate some examples of the "sondification"
you have done. Here at Illinois I have seen the thunderstorms
etc. that our super-computing center has done--truly mind-
boggling. Is everyone aware of these videos?
--
Marsha Woodbury mars...@uiuc.edu
A simile is like a metaphor.
University of Illinois, Middle of Nowhere

[Michael A. Neacsu]

Marsha,

Some work has been done with regional acid deposition models
(RADM) from the US-EPA. Some work is planned for sondification
of El Nino data from the Pacific ocean. Mostly, we're in the
exploratory (fun and games :-) development stage. Do you want a
video of our work? What's your street address? Do you have any
interesting idea?

Michael

[FO...@wcsub.ctstateu.edu]

Please... more on the UIUC thunderstorm simulations.
Geoff Fox

[Marsha Woodbury]

to Geoff and others:

Mind you, I am no expert...the director of the lab is
David Kuck, and the e-mail goes to d-k...@uiuc.edu

In short, the people at the lab do the most amazing
graphical presentations of numerical data. They take
everything that is known about a storm--height of cloud,
density, windspeed, etc. and feed it into their model--
and we see the cloud from it's lowly beginnings to gaining
mass as it moves at speed over the ground. Very
dramatic. Edward Tufte came here and worked with them
last year to add visual clues, so the viewer could
work out the length in miles, etc. It is amazing
to see their presentations of otherwise dull data--
electrons bouncing, etc. all in animated, colorful,
expressionistic form.

[Jeff.Sp...@um.cc.umich.edu]

I've seen the thunderstorm thing and it's really beautiful...Tufte showed
it when he was here last Spring and talked about some of the design issues
they went over while putting it together.

Another example of sonification from the NCSA is in their Landscape Dynamics
of Yellowstone National Park representation. They show several representations
of the role of forest fires in the park from 1690 to 1990 including one with
animated colors and sounds representing the average age of the trees in the
park and occurrences of fires. It's pretty neat, but in a small study I did
trying to get preliminary data on whether this representation works or not,
most of the subjects were just confused and annoyed with the sound. Mind, you
this was not a rigorous study, so the results are anecdotal at best ;-).

Here's another example I think I mentioned in a previous message: Bob Kozma
(Prof in the School of Education) is researching media affects on students
learning chemistry. (whoops, I meant 'effects') His software shows multiple
representations of concepts. For example, to show the effect of heating
something, the student can look at a video clip of the apparatus in the lab
including the thermometer, see a time-temp-energy-whatever graph, and see
and hear "molecules" bouncing around in a beaker. You hear a click sound when
molecules collide or hit the side of the beaker and I think the pitch goes
up as the temp goes up. It's good stuff; he'll be running some studies soon.

Cheers!
--Jeff Spitulnik
--School of Education
--University of Michigan
--spit...@um.cc.umich.edu
--USE...@UMICHUM.BITNET