“…Some cases draw a clear relationship between data and sound: in a time series mapping of brain activity to pitch to hear seizures in epileptic patients, a simple power law relationship traces the microvolt amplitude of brain activity using pitch height (Parvizi et al, 2018). However, in instances where there is no clear variable to map to pitch, given how strongly we cue to this element of sound (Hegg et al, 2018), one might imagine a sonification composed of chord progressions, the structure of which is defined by higher-order moments in the data (e.g., slope, skewness, kurtosis) or weighted averages of multiple variables. While such mappings might provide a clear holistic picture of the shape of the scientific data, or draw attention to specific aspects, the relationship between the raw data and the audio becomes increasingly abstracted, potentially increasing the difficulty in conveying the science behind the sound.…”