International Community for Auditory Display

In this paper, we introduce space filling curves (SFC) as a useful possibility to organize data for sonification. First, we give a brief overview about the history of SFCs and their graphical construction. Then we focus on the mapping properties of SFCs from 2D to one dimension. We present the acoustic results of an implementation of the described method, in which we took the Hilbert curve as one particular example of an SFC. The actual sonification program features different methods for real-time interaction. These methods take advantage of the particular properties of SFCs. We further discuss their restrictions, how they can be circumvented, and give an outlook to future applications, where we also make suggestions as to how the properties of SFCs can be combined with methods of data reduction.