Volcanofest: Outreach Fair Demonstrations Handbook

The Volcano
Listening Project
https://volcanolisteningproject.org
Listening to data is not common practice. But we
think it should be.
Why sonification? Scientists are traditionally trained visually. But humans (scientists or not) are
innately capable of recognizing patterns and events in noisy environmental sounds. There are
opportunities for discovery by engaging with data in new ways. And sonification, particularly when
paired with visualization, is a powerful outreach tool.
An example workflow for ʻchord sweep’
tilt sonification, from Barth et al., 2020.
(A) Normalized tilt data from the Lone
Star Geyser, Yellowstone NP, USA. (B)
Triangular weight functions are mapped
to envelopes (C) to which are assigned
audio frequencies (D). The resulting
audio spectrogram is shown in (E).
Workshops & Subscription
Services
The Volcano Listening Project is an informal
group of scientists and musicians. We
are developing python-based software
for data sonification. We run workshops
and generate “data movies” as outreach
tools.
Barth, Anna, et al. "Sonification and Animation of Multivariate Data to
Illuminate Dynamics of Geyser Eruptions." Computer Music Journal
44.1 (2020): 35-50.
Please reach out to Leif Karlstrom
(leif@uoregon.edu) if you want to get
involved, check out the website for
examples of datamovies, and read the
papers for technical details.
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