Sonifikation von Simulationen in der Computerphysik

Dissertation

My thesis treats the topic „sonification and particle physics“. It examines, in how far sonification is an apt method for problems of particle physics.

Sonification is defined as the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data. It is an analogon to visualisation, that is scientific graphs. The advantage lies in the psycho-acoustic system that allows to hear and decompose complex data structures. Whilst in visualisation one is bound to 3 dimensions, sonification is mulit-dimensional using e.g. Pitch, amplitude, spatial location, rhzthm or timbre. Since the 1990s sonification has been made possible by growing computational power and appopriate acoustical software.

The interdisciplinary research project SonEnvir (http://sonenvir.at) provided the frameework for the first part of this thesis. In cooperation with the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Sociology, the Institute of Neurology and the Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory we searched for universal sonification techniques. During this project, we studied the following physical problems:

• Display quantum spectra of baryons (e.g., proton and neutron);

• 2- and 3-dimensional models of the Ising and Potts type;

• big 4-dimensional data sets stemming from lattice quantum chromodynamics.

As programming language, we use SuperCollider3. Results of this thesis can easily be adopted to other scientific fields using, e.g., higher-dimensional modelling.