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Abstract Sonification, or the practice of generating sound from data, is a promising alternative or complement to data visualization for exploring research questions in the life sciences. Expressing or communicating data in the form of sound rather than graphs, tables, or renderings can provide a secondary information source for multitasking or remote monitoring purposes or make data accessible when visualizations cannot be used. While popular in astronomy, neuroscience, and geophysics as a technique for data exploration and communication, its potential in the biological and biotechnological sciences has not been fully explored. In this review, we introduce sonification as a concept, some examples of how sonification has been used to address areas of interest in biology, and the history of the technique. We then highlight a selection of biology‐related publications that involve sonifications of DNA datasets and protein datasets, sonifications for data collection and interpretation, and sonifications aimed to improve science communication and accessibility. Through this review, we aim to show how sonification has been used both as a discovery tool and a communication tool and to inspire more life‐science researchers to incorporate sonification into their own studies.
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The Sounds of Sorting Algorithms: Sonification as a Pedagogical Tool
Much work already exists on algorithm visualization—the graphical representation of an algorithm’s behavior—and its benefits for student learning. Visualization, however, offers limited benefit for students with visual impairments. This paper explores algorithm sonification—the representation of an algorithm’s behavior using sound. To simplify the creation of sonifications for modern algorithms, this paper presents a new Thread Safe Audio Library (TSAL). To illustrate how to create sonifications, the authors have added TSAL calls to four common sorting algorithm implementations, so that as the program accesses a value being sorted, the program plays a tone whose pitch is scaled to that value’s magnitude. In the resulting sonifications, one can (in real time) hear the behavioral differences of the different sorting algorithms as they run, and directly experience how fast (or slow) the algorithms sort the same sequence, compared to one another. This paper presents experimental evidence that the sonifications improve students’ long-term recall of the four sorting algorithms’ relative speeds. The paper also discusses other potential uses of sonification.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1822486
- PAR ID:
- 10353960
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 52nd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 189 to 195
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499304
