International Community for Auditory Display

I am interested in comments from the ICAD community regarding recent image sonification explorations I have been doing in conjunction with a museum exhibit I am designing related to the Stereo Space Mission project. The project is funded as part of a two year NASA Ideas grant.

On my new website at www.drsrl.com you will find a number of links to pages that end in the word 'music', such as solarmusic, artmusic, photomusic, sidmusic (aurora), etc. The work directly related to the project is primarly at solarmusic. 

I recently spoke on the artmusic page as part of the SoundScape panel at the Art Education for the Blind conference titled Multimodal Approaches to Learning, Creativity and Communication at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. I also showcased some of these approaches at the Youth Slam at the National Federation of the Blind this year.

The sonifications of the art uses a design based on tranlating color into instrument timbre and brightness of the pixel into pitch. I use a scale of 18 instruments for color and 36 notes or 5 octaves in a Spanish Gypsy scale for the pitch using a Hue Saturation Brightness color model. The saturation affects the volume of the notes a bit. The pictures are scanned from top to bottom, left to right, playing 200 lines of the images of the art. On any particular line, I can control the number of sonic needles or voices or virtual musicians that play the pixel information. For all the images on this page, I use 150 needles. The design is set for all the images so that the pictures may be sonically compared to one another. Each picture takes about 1:30 min to experience it. Prior to playing the scan of each image, I sonically explore the image with the mouse, sonifying the points as they are encountered.

On the solarmusic movie, I use 16 needles down a meridian line. As the Sun rotates, the new pixels moves into the sonified line and produce music. 

Slower versions of the scanning can be heard on the photomusic page. Other varieties of scanning such as what you might see on a radar display can also be seen/heard on the solarmusic images above the movie.

Any references related to the issues presented in this work would be greatly appreciated, as well as your comments and experiences. I have an evaluation document for the artmusic page, and will link it off the page in a day or so. If you have some friends who are visually handicapped that would like to evaluate it, please let me know.  

Best regards,

Marty