G.I. MIHALAȘ*,***^#, MINODORA ANDOR**, ANCA TUDOR***, S. PARALESCU**

*Commission of Medical Informatics and Data Protection, Academy of Medical Sciences, Romania
**Department of Medical Semiotics, “Victor Babeș” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timișoara
***Centre for Modelling Biological Systems and Data Analysis,
“Victor Babeș” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timișoara, Romania

This review paper makes a synthetic survey on ‘sonification’ – a novel procedure to
represent data by sounds. The Methods section comprises a short theoretical background of the
domain, focusing on the mapping algorithms, associating sound parameters (pitch, duration) to major
data parameters (amplitude, sequence time-course). It also refers to various ways to improve the
acoustic perception for specific cases – tempolenses, saccadic displays, loudness. The Results section
starts with enumeration of most popular sonification software packages, some references of various
applications, including also some of our results for sonification of ECG or heart rate during exercise,
including a short description of our methodology for estimating the discriminant power by comparing
various sonic displays of the same set of data. The comments of the Discussion section can be viewed
as suggestions for future work and finding new applications.

 

Key words: data representation, sonification, auditory display, tempolenses, heart rate, ECG.

Corresponding author’s e-mail: ^#e-mail: mihalas@umft.ro

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