Sonifigrapher. Sonified Light Curve Synthesizer

Abstract

In an attempt to contribute to the constant feedback existing between science and music, this work describes the design strategies used in the development of the virtual synthesizer prototype called Sonifigrapher. Trying to achieve new ways of creating experimental music through the exploration of exoplanet data sonifications, this software provides an easy-to-use graph-to-sound quadraphonic converter, designed for the sonification of the light curves from NASA’s publicly-available exoplanet archive. Based on some features of the first analog tape recorder samplers, the prototype allows end-users to load a light curve from the archive and create controlled audio spectra making use of additive synthesis sonification. It is expected to be useful in creative, educational and informational contexts as part of an experimental and interdisciplinary development project for sonification tools, oriented to both non-specialized and specialized audiences.

Open Your Ears and Take a Look: A State‐of‐the‐Art Report on the Integration of Sonification and Visualization

“…Riber [Rib18] presented a prototypical virtual and interactive audio synthesizer called Planethesizer that enables its users to design sonifications, especially focused on planetary data. Sonifigrapher [Rib19] is a virtual synthesizer that lets users sonify the light curves data from NASA's exoplanet archive. Also, the recently presented Sonified Hertzsprung‐Russel Diagram [HPDW23] sonifies the light curves, with the diagram acting as both the visualization and the interface to choose a star to be sonified.…”

“…Several papers in our database describe frameworks that are explicitly developed for the design of sonifications (see examples in Figure 3), always in combination with a visualization [PC19, PCB23,LF21,DLVDCG22,Rib19,CWM21]. As a representative and flexible example we want to discuss the Highcharts Sonification Studio [CWM21], a collaboration between the company Highcharts and the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab.…”

“…(b) The WebAudioXML Sonification Toolkit (WAST) user interface by Lindetorp and Falkenberg [LF21] also aimed for general sonification tasks. (c) The Sonifigrapher virtual synthesizer interface by Riber [Rib19] for sonifying light curves. All screenshots CC BY 4.0.…”

“…Nevertheless, the majority of papers in the surveyed literature offer the search level of “explore” and, in general, most papers use the same search level for both their visualization and their sonification parts (see Table 2 and Table 4). Some examples of designs employing the same search level are [CB17,DCM*18, ERI*22,FBC12,Rib19,GR11,HK22], while fewer combine different search levels for the two modalities [HAR16, RFK*15, RJ16, AK11, Bal15, CWM21].…”

“…Concerning the levels of measurement of the displayed data, we observe, again, that most idioms display data from the same level (see Table 5). We list a selection of cases for ratio data [ASH*12, DCM*18, GRK*16, PFH*22, Rön21], for interval data [BB19,DLVDCG22,Rib19,Her20,MMU16], for ordinal data [AK11,LF21,PCB23], and for nominal data [GKW21,HAR16, NSC16], and now will continue with a discussion of three methods to map the data to the senses, the levels of redundancy.…”