Sonification
Developing the Practice and Theory of Stream-based Sonification - Steven Barrass
Mlekuz, D. (2004). Listening to landscapes: modelling past soundscapes in GIS. Internet Archaeology, 16 is a classic.
https://datajournalism.com/read/longreads/data-sonification?utm_source=loudnumbers&utm_medium=email
https://www.saralenzi.com/datasonificationblog
https://www.ekho-verlag.com/abstracts-crossing-borders/crosssing-borders-hughes-elliott-edmonds/
Image Sonification
https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=y_n1DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22At+any+given+moment%E2%80%99:+duration+in+archaeology+and+photography%22+Mark+Knight+and+Lesley+McFadyen&ots=hcAn9hfRzw&sig=lvsJTD0pd0UP10yGJHvg2a81_k0&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false “Our alternative view is to understand Photography not as representation but as transformation, and to find hope in renewing its potential in Archaeology not to perpetuate but to make ‘trouble’ for civilization”
http://www.digitalhumanities.org//dhq/vol/15/1/000508/000508.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228625435_Sonic_panoramas_Experiments_with_interactive_landscape_image_sonification
Dr. Graham’s tutorials: https://electricarchaeology.ca/2021/03/01/the-dig-we-know-where-the-bodies-are-buried/; https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/sonification Brian Foo’s sonifications: https://github.com/beefoo/music-lab-scripts; https://datadrivendj.com/ Daniel Ruten’s sound icon sonification: https://programminghistorian.org/posts/sonic-word-clouds; https://danielruten.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/sonic-word-clouds-an-experiment-with-data-sonification-part-i-introduction/ Spatial sonification: https://lifeorange.com/SM/presentation/
Scaper: https://scaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html Sox: http://sox.sourceforge.net/
The Sonification Handbook: https://sonification.de/handbook/; http://sonification.de/handbook/index.php/chapters/
Data sonification is defined as “the process of translating numerical data into sound.” It aims to translate relationships between data into sounds, transforming the medium of the original data for the purposes of communication and interpretation.
Image sonification
From unpublished paper, Dr. G: (this is all quotes of his work)
- By remediating digital copies of archival images through sound, sonification adds duration to them, and with duration, a linear kind of narrative structure emerges (on the potential of narrative emergence in digital media, see Copplestone & Dunne 2017).” Unpublished paper
- “Sonifying photographs through their digital image data enhances what we might understand from these photographs, and pushes us to think differently about what else we might know from them; it is uncomfortable listening.
- Kramer and Noel (2020) remind us that this kind of remediation ‘can illuminate new dimensions of digital archive through defamiliarization of visual representation and an expanded range of sensory comprehension’. o In the digital humanities, this kind of action is known as ‘deformance’, a portmanteau of ‘deform’ and ‘performance’ (Samuels and McGann 1999).
- The act of translating archaeological information into sound opens up new ways to elicit what Sara Perry calls ‘enchantment’ (2019), a kind of engagement that aims to move us emotionally and push a fuller, richer engagement with the past.
- Sonifying images is not done with the hope of pulling quantifiable data for understanding the past depicted in the image. It is for enchanting our engagement with our own archaeological practices in the era when the photos were taken, and this present moment when we re-engage. “…the use of digital sound design has made it possible to “amplify the meaning” of a historical event […] by inviting us “to hear an image while listening to its digitized data”, [we establish] a new kind of historical hermeneutics of visual sources.” (Kramer & Noël 2020)’. “
“In principle, the process of sonification is straightforward. Just as the visual representation of data maps dimensions of the data to visual aesthetics - counts of artefacts along the x axis of a grid, dates arrayed along the y axis to indicate change over time - aesthetics of sound like duration, loudness, note, timber, rhythms can be mapped to elements from the pixel data of the images (Graham 2016). There can be a great deal of artistry involved, as in the work by Graham, Reinhard and Kansa related to the sonification of artefact counts at Poggio Civitate. Sonification in general is a reproducible process though, where if other researchers approached the same data with the same mappings, they would hear the same results. Sonification should also be ‘intelligible’, in that there is a systematic relationship between the elements that are sonified and the resulting sound (Hermann 2008). “[T]he relationship to sensation central to sonification…is most distinctively characterized by the ability to transform data destined for one sense into data destined for another […] this extreme plasticity lays bare the degree to which the senses themselves are articulated into different cultural, technological, and epistemic formations” Sterne and Akiyama 2012, 545. “
“The materials we study always have an impact on the kinds of history or archaeology that we can write; Kramer points to this plasticity as a way towards a ‘digital hermeneutics’ that revolves around the interplay of the sense of sight with the sense of sound (Kramer 2018, 196-7.) In particular, Kramer (citing Walter Ong), points to the way sight makes us into external observers, while sound ‘pours into’ us. Kramer calls this a kind of digital synaesthesia that slows us down, an ‘exploratory audio tactic’ (Kramer 2021, 4).”