Science by Ear - Fitting the Pieces of the Puzzle

Date: March 16-18 2006 Location: IEM Graz, Inffeldgasse 10

A 3-day interdisciplinary workshop on sonification will be held at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz / Austria (IEM) from March 16-18, 2006. This workshop will bring together international experts in the area of sonification with distinguished scientists from sonification application domains. Researchers from such diverse areas as quantum physics, neurology, social sciences, assistive technologies and nonlinear signal processing will have the opportunity to make firsthand experiences with sonification for research questions from their fields; sonification experts will receive valuable feedback on their sonification design approaches. Furthermore, we hope to gain insights on interdisciplinary collaboration processes.

The following presentations are open to the IEM staff:

Do 16.3. 10h: Greg Kramer, Metta Organisation, Keynote on Sonification and its Community

Do 16.3. 14h: Terri Bonebright, DePauw Univ., Auditory Perception and Sonification

Fr. 17.3. 9h45: Florian Dombois, HKB Bern, Interdisciplinary Interests in Sonification (1878-now),

Sa. 18.3. 9h45 Thomas Hermann, Uni Bielefeld, Model-based Sonification for Interacting with Data

Sa. 18.3. 14h15 Tony Stockman, Queen Mary Univ. London, Sonification in Assistive Technology

Whereas statistical data analysis as well as data perceptualization by visualization data renditions are accepted standards, the logical complement, sonification, is not as well-established, and not readily available as a technology. The technical and conceptual development of sonification into an equal alternative and complement is being addressed in a number of research projects; among others, the SonEnvir project hosted at IEM, which forms the context of this workshop. The crucial issue in sonification research is its interdisciplinary nature: audio experts need to understand the domains for which they design auditory displays and their requirements more deeply. Scientists in these target domains need to understand sound as an information carrier, and its benefits for them, more profoundly. Both need to learn to communicate effectively for such an interdisciplinary venture to succeed - this is what the workshop aims to achieve.

Finally, the workshop aims at exploring new application fields of sonification, demonstrating and discussing the current state of the art in sonification research, and encouraging the knowledge transfer among sound experts and application domain experts. The latter are strongly encouraged to submit data sets from their current research problems and a short description to the workshop organizers prior to the workshop. By preparing initial sonification designs for these data sets, we expect to generate interesting material for experimentation and discussion during the workshop.

Hosting organization: iem.at

Organizing committee: Gerhard Eckel, Graz, Tony Stockman, London, Thomas Hermann, Bielefeld

Workshop coordination: Christopher Frauenberger, Graz, Alberto de Campo, Graz

Contact: workshop@sonenvir.at

Sonenvir