Editorial: Sonification, Perceptualizing Biological Information

Sonification is a subtype of auditory displays that use sound structures devoid of linguistic elements to represent information. Kramer et al. (1999) have neatly defined sonification as “the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation.” The sense of hearing has the potential to convey in a simple way information that is complementary or alternative to visualization. Applications of sonification are by no means recent, in fact from early formulation of auditing, such as comparing the sound of commodities or “hearing of accounts” in Mesopotamia, as early as 3500 BCE (Worrall, 2009), to the three inventions from the nineteenth century, the Bell telephone, the Edison phonograph, and the Marconi radiotelegraphy, sound and audio were used and transformed to convey information. Many of these developments included translations of information into sound and were so powerful and rich of outcomes to change ultimately our relation to hearing in general. Commonly, implementations of sound constructions for information display are described for alarms, alerts, and warnings, status, process, and monitoring messages, data exploration, and finally for entertainment, sports, exercise, and art (Walker and Nees, 2011).