Overview

The 2nd `Science By Ear' workshop (SBE2)  took place at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz, from 25th to 27th of February, 2010.

Within the same workshop design as SBE1, interdisciplinary teams worked in parallel sessions on sonifications of different data sets. 20 people with backgrounds in sonification design, programming (SuperCollider3, SC3), physics and other domain sciences, sociology, and music were invited. The data sets stemmed from computer physics (Inst. for physics, University of Graz), measured data from experimental physics (CERN/ALICE) and climatology (WEGCenter):

• Monopole Loops in lattice quantum electrodynamics

• TPC: Data from the Time Projection Chamber at ALICE/CERN
• CENTER - Clusters: data from lattice quantum chromodynamics
• RO: Radio-occultation data from climatology
  

For each data set, a short introduction was given by a domain expert. Then, 2 or 3 teams were built, consisting of programmers, sonification experts and domain scientists. In sessions of 2 to 3 hours, they developed a sonification approach for the data set. In the plenum, these different sonifications were presented and discussed. An evaluation based on the Multi Criteria Decision Analysis was tried out.

Additionally to the sessions, Th. Hermann gave an introductional talk on interaction improving sonification. M. Schmickler and A. de Campo played an electronic music piece based on astronomical data (`Bonner Durchmusterung', program in german). I. Renner and F. Dombois presented sonifications of measurement data from potatoes and spruces. In an `open space' session, results were wrapped up and the documentation was completed.

You may find information on the data sets (Task&Data Analysis sheets are provided), the data itself, and the sonification approaches of each team, as well as the SC3 patches in the folders on the left hand side. Audio files and a summary of the evaluation results are also available.

The workshop was partly funded by Land Steiermark.