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40 The Florida Reading Journal -- Vol. 48, No. 3, Summer 2012
Figure 3: “Playing” the cover of Because of
Winn-Dixie using the Music in Images
sonification tool.
Another sonification tool I found that can
also be used for reading, was Music in Images
(http://www.musicinimages.com/). This tool is
an algorithmic music generator that allows you
to upload an image and then have that image
converted into music. I found this to create very
calming tones, something that could be great
for some ambient music that could play while
the students were reading. Often the music
created with this tool was reminiscent of
multiple wind chimes. My thought would be to
use the Music in Images with book covers,
where the teacher would upload a book cover
and then the site would create the music based
on the image‟s pixel information (color,
saturation, brightness). Using it with books like
Kate DiCamillo‟s Because of Winn-Dixie (see
Figure 3) made a wonderful variety of tones
because of the variations within the image,
while books like Carl Hiaasen‟s Chomp were
much more limiting as most of the book‟s
cover is a single color.
Further examples of the usefulness of
sonification to visualization include:
• uncovering patterns masked in visual
displays
• identifying new phenomena current
display techniques miss
• improving data exploration of large multidimensional
and multi-dataset
• exploring in frequency rather than spatial
dimensions
• analyzing complex, rapidly, or temporally
changing data
• complementing existing visual displays
• monitoring data while looking at
something else (background eventfinding)
• improving visual perception when
accompanied by audio cues
So the next time you are teaching
visualization, you might also want to include
sonification as one of the ways that something
can be “visualized” or at least play the book‟s
cover using dreambells with power chords, it
makes some nice ambient music.
Happy reading with technology.