7. Conclusions
By charting a practice-based design methodology for sonification, we reveal an array of political, aesthetic, functional, and practical design choices that coalesce to produce sonic information. In the case of public engagement, our design work begins at a higher conceptual level with a message and aesthetic we wish to convey and works down to operational level decisions concerning synthesis methods and psychoacoustics. For example, in terms of visualization practices for climate data, the color red is often chosen to demonstrate the most detrimental environmental effects of pollution. Similarly, we designed our sonification to utilize the timbral quality of “noisiness” to signify the presence of more air pollution. Yet, in so doing we solidify a symbolic relationship between noise and pollution: a political decision, given the contested definition of “noise.” As our focus groups further pointed out, another symbolic mapping approach in this case would have been to aim not to represent pollution but to simulate and evoke the effectsof air pollution on the body and health: to design sonification that muffles, disturbs or suffocates. It is safe to say that this latter approach to sonifying data would be considered more an “artistic” rather than a scientific or perceptually valid approach in the history and canon of sonification design (Supper 2015). To be clear, this paper makes no assertion that these kinds of decisions would be right or wrong in this context, but simply reveals that these decisions exist or could exist and that they must be acknowledged as relying on already established listening semantics. Our provocation here is: what does it mean to prioritize the importance of a symbolic approach to sonification design rather than to be led first and foremost by principles of psychoacoustics? The cost of a strict psychoacoustic approach would be to ignore the societal relevance, symbolic meaning, and context of reception of a sonification designed for pubic engagement, a lost opportunity to understand what constitutes an effective information design strategy: visual, aural, or otherwise. Our assertion is that opening up a sonification design conversation in this way can uniquely and meaningfully address and inform the diversity of design choices available for sonification, also taking into account any specific political goal and desired listening outcomes: comprehension, awareness, emotional connection.
The true lesson of sonification is not just that it is a useful tool. Sonification sheds light on the ways we choose to communicate scientific and socially relevant data for all users, including the broader public. Since we live in an ocularcentric world it is often easy to forget that all the graphs, Venn diagrams, box plots, infographics, and visualizations we use are full of calculated design choices – from scaling, to color theory, to graph and chart shapes – meant to engage a viewer in a particular way; sonification is no different. Listening to data generates, as we demonstrate here, unique opportunities for reflection and conversation about the domain topic as well as its social and cultural relevance in the public domain. Sonification, as many increasingly contend, can occupy a unique space alongside popular visualizations of information, outside the realms of both scientific knowledge-sharing and artistic performance, and function as an alternative modality for engaging with socially relevant data. In turn, connecting the discourse of practical sonification design to the politics of information representation creates a unique space to revisit the design theory of infographics in the public domain.
