| Auditory display, or sonification, is the representation of data using sound, and provides a means for examining information in addition to or in lieu of visualization. Current approaches to creating auditory mappings include synthesized, natural/event-based, and musical techniques. This research focuses on using musical concepts and constructs to systematically generate engaging, non-fatiguing, and familiar sounds to allow for meaningful exploration of information.; This work describes the design and implementation of a sonification toolkit, MUSART (MUSical Audio transfer function Real-time Toolkit). MUSART produces musical sound maps that are played in real-time. Register, pitch, timbre, chords, duration, silence, loudness, beats, and panning are the musical concepts used to create melodic sound maps. Univariate and multivariate data sets are sonified using various sound parameter combinations. Users are given the flexibility to create personalized auditory displays by mapping each data dimension of a data set to one or more sound parameters.; MUSART is designed to be flexible so that it can be used in several application. In this work, we have applied musical auditory maps to analyze the three-dimensional seismic data used for detecting areas for drilling oil and explore flow in vector field data. A multimodal seismic application is used to explore three-dimensional seismic data, where two-dimensional slices of sedimentary layers are visualized. Information related to faults, rock layers, and the ratio of local maxima is highlighted with sonification. The characteristics of vector field data are examined through a multimodal fluid flow application. Auditory displays are developed to enhance flow visualizations of flow variables (velocity, density, momentum, energy, pressure, temperature), streamline characteristics (distance, angle, direction), and topological features (numbers of critical points).; MUSART transcends sonification toolkits from its previous counterparts which generate synthesized or arbitrary musical maps to an environment which systematically generates musical sound maps that are more familiar, less fatiguing, and more engaging to a user. However, we must further explore MUSART's effectiveness with a diverse array of disciplines and conduct user studies, in order to exploit MUSART to its full potential. |
