PRACTICAL CHALLENGES
A new research direction emerging at the interdisciplinary intersection of multiple fields is easily misunderstood by practitioners grounded in those fields. Further, when new directions are located between or outside of disciplines, they can also struggle to find a venue for presentation. This has been the case with Listening Into the Lattice, where we have encountered resistance in the forms of internal conceptual difficulty emerging out of normative models for how research is produced in our fields. This new work requires a means of presentation that does not demand too hasty a definition of what our efforts eventually hope to achieve, thereby a foreclosure of experimental possibility for the long-term project. The arts provide a more flexible set of venues for presentation than is generally encountered in the sciences, however we are concerned to make the work accessible to a wide-range of listeners, not only those versed in contemporary art or experimental sound work.
While scientific sonification is generally popular for outreach purposes, it is seldom used by scientific researchers. Listening to or for data has been traditionally practiced in some fields (Bijsterveld, 2019, Latham, 2023), but overall sonification is underused in laboratory work. While there are many reasons for this, lack of familiarity with sonification is probably the principal cause. Listening to data for the purpose of conveying quantitative relationships often requires training and practice with the sonification system to be used. Researchers are reasonably reluctant to give up their time to acquire skills with a new system that they are unsure will be of long-term benefit. Audible display of data is often of lower resolution than the numeric data of which it is derived, and audio representations of data (like audible graphs) are generally less immediately comparable one to the other than visual graphs.
Fortunately, our project was not developed with the intention of displaying data for laboratory use. We instead began from a curiosity about the materials involved, in terms of both ‘sound’ and ‘antique glass data’. We have not sought to literally convey detailed quantitative aspects of the data to listeners, but instead to create an environment that would allow listeners to explore what is heard as sound itself. With this in mind, and with a minimal amount of supplied information and a powerful use of spatial audio, we aimed for listeners to then be able to use the sounds to imaginarily project themselves into audible models of glass molecules.
However, in presenting the project we found that not giving primacy to conveyance of data through sound-language proved a stumbling block to making our project understood in data-science, auditory display, and human-computer interaction (HCI) oriented sonification communities. In a recent attempt to present our work within an auditory display context, we encountered resistance because our research did not include analysis of user studies. However, since this project is not intended to communicate quantifiable aspects of data to listeners, what would be the point of conducting user studies other than to celebrate the multiplicity of potential experiences from the environment? Our project does ‘display’ data, it simply does so in a much more qualitative manner and for different reasons than the use-cases generally found within HCI-oriented fields. We do not seek to reduce interpretation to naïve certainty, but to encourage multiplicity of experiences, therefore we must avoid studying the results in any way that risks framing the field of potential discoveries too narrowly for listeners. A user study would have been a distraction, as the primary concern is to explore a novel soundscape-experience (from within), rather than to seek to verify (from ‘without’) whether or not information has been communicated, and if so at what resolution.
The resistances we have encountered have proven helpful in focusing the questions the project seeks to ask. In the following sections, I will discuss the structure of the data and how it was approached for spatial sonification. Following this technical discussion, conceptual issues raised by and investigated within this work, along with next steps, will be discussed.
(Sonification Example: Dataset line 9: an example of a green, hollow-stemmed specimen.
However, here only the oxides CaO and Al2O3 are selected for sonification. The changes is heard a few seconds in.)
This image is from a series of sketches created by the author in developing the sound world for the project.
Here the IKO speaker array is depicted embedded within an ancient Roman glass pitcher,
an artefact held in the National Museum of Scotland.
This represents a humourous commentary on the problems encountered
while attempting to 'superimpose' disciplines.