(the sketch on this page and others like it elsewhere in this expositon is from the prototyping and idea-generation phrase of the author's imagining for how molecular data might "feel" spatialised as audio)
WHAT IS SONIFICATION?
Sonification, for the purpose of the present work, is an area of interactions in which the circumstances of the meeting of sound and information are situated for communicative, exploratory, or creative purposes. Sonification is a particularly apt methodology for interdisciplinary work as it is already a critical intersection of fields in its own right (De Campo, 2009). The practice of sonification has existed in a formal academic sense since at least the 1990s and is the subject of a yearly conference (ICAD, 2022). In the sonic arts, sonification as a corpus of techniques has been in widespread use since at least the 1970s (eg. Watts, et al, 1974). It continues to be a much used and ever-developing corpus of practice and technique in the contemporary sonic arts (Caddy et al, 2024, Parvianen,2023, Pelletier, 2023). Consideration of sonification aesthetics is fundamental to any undertaking of sonification (Vickers, et al., 2017, 2006). While numerous domain-specific definitions of sonification exist (Scaletti, 1994, Barass, 1997, Kramer, 1999, Hermann 2008) and are often intoned, the present work is outside the boundaries specified by the exemplified domain-specific definitions. Sonification here describes an interdisciplinary attitude towards sound and meaning and a set of approaches shared by many fields.
GENERAL APPROACH TO SONIFICATION DESIGN IN ‘LISTENING INTO THE LATTICE’
Much sonification maps time-series data onto a sound signal that likewise fluctuates in time, and examples abound in astrophysical and geophysical sciences (Trayford, 2024, Nasa, 2007, Alexander, 2011, Dunkerley, 2022). Where possible, such mappings can unfold in real time or in a ‘designed’ time-space determined by the artist. These approaches are present in earlier works of mine, for example She Surfs, Irminger Channels and my recent solo exhibition Norths (Boehringer, 2021b). However, in the present project the data is not derived from a series of events or changes in time, so it is necessary to determine how temporal experience can unfold from static data. Where data has no built-in time relation, we must still take the listener’s formation of temporal frames of reference time into account. Anything we do with the data in time involves imposing a perspective on it. Careful consideration of as many contextual factors as possible is necessary to avoid biasing the work in unintended ways, and we seek our designed space to focus around an area of interactions that include listener.
The glass specimens that yield the molecular data we use are not visible without a microscope. In response, we have employed spatial audio to create an immersive sound environment that collapses the distance between the scale of the human body and the microscopic scale of material, such that through our sculptural sound environment listeners can locate themselves within a molecular model of each specimen in the dataset. By rendering the sound field in a physically apprehensible, visceral manner, as a dense three-dimensional environment containing multiple sound behaviours that can be followed by ear and felt upon the skin, we aim to bring the data into intimate proximity with listeners.
Such viscerality is sought by sonification strategies involving bone conduction (GT Sonification Lab, 2024), much work has been towards sonification of molecular data (Newbold et al., 2015, Majhour at al., 2022, Liu et al., 2019, Arbon et al, 2018),
and even some involving spatial audio (McIlraith et al, 2015), however the approach in each cases, while interesting, differ from the present project in that sound is primarily instrumentalised for an exclusively communicative purpose in these projects. Closer in spirit to the present work are approaches by Louise Mackenzie which embody relationships to molecules in multidimensional sonic experience using sonification (Mackenzie et al. 2016, 2020).
Based on my own recent research (Boehringer, 2021b) into literal, spatial mappings of data for empirical sonification, we created a parameter mapping between dataset and sound. Parameter mapping (Grond, 2011) associates information with auditory parameters. The mapping, explicated in the following sections, after a discussion of the spatialisation system, remains consistent across the dataset.
While parameter mapping itself is a traditionally undertaken methodology for sonification, my sonification work uses space more literally. Rather than space as a field or media in which heard parameters map to data, spatial experience itself is harnessed as a communicative affordance in my work. My recent works explicitly demonstrate that spatial audio need not not function to merely animate a particular parameter to, but may instead enable the fundamental function of the sonification to unfold in the phenomenological experience of the listener. In Irminger Channels (Boehringer, 2021) two ocean-based sensor arrays 20 km apart are sonified directly to two spatially-separated columns of loudspeakers in the exhibition space (or binaural stereo headphones). By simply retaining the discrete nature of the data sources within the sonification apparatus, the function of space as that field in which changes within the data are enacted (in this case between two identical sensor arrays) is physically apprehended.
Similarly, experiences of space in my sonification work allow for apprehension of data directly as felt spatial experience. In Trve Norths, a work from 2023, magnetic declination is sonified as a physically felt psychoacoustic phenomenon of auditory beating (Boehringer, 2023). Thus, while the synthesis underlying the sound production still relies on mapping data to frequency (a basic parameter mapping), an understanding and communication of data through experience is achieved here through tactile, kinesthetic, and psychoacoustic cues rather than upon memory and analysis of frequency or other parameters.
The molecular 'spaces' of Listening into the Lattice are speculative ones, quantum relations having no literal semblance within everyday life. However, the use of space in this project retains its semi-autonomy as information delivered via pressure, density, and movement, complementing and interacting with that information embodied in the parameter mapping which enlivens the data.