Training the listener

Ensure listeners will derive meaning from a sonification piece by introducing the "sonic vocabulary" of the composition.

🧠 📖 Imagine listening to a poem being recited in a foreign language. The words may sound beautiful, and the dancing cadence of the verses may be imbued with a certain identifiable mood. But ultimately, you don’t understand the deeper meaning of the poem because it is in a language you haven’t learned.

🧠 🔊 Now imagine hearing a data sonification recording without any context, explanation, or prior familiarization with the sounds it contains. Similar to the poem in a foreign language, you’re not deriving much meaning from the sonification because you haven’t learned the “sonic vocabulary” (or “sonic lexicon”) needed to understand it.

In some cases, that’s completely fine! Many composers of data-driven audio create content that is meant to exist without an explicit description.

📚 👂 For storytelling purposes, however, it can be particularly helpful to the listener to learn the meaning of auditory layers early on in the listening experience. Prior familiarization with the separate components of a sonification may help a listener know what to expect and thus better understand the meaning of the “macro” composition.

• “The sound of a falling currency" (BBC Sounds: World at One, Jul 8, 2016) — This sonification indicates the sharp decrease in value of the British Pound immediately following Brexit, when the UK voted to leave the European Union. The narrator provides contextual meaning to the sounds as soon as the sonification begins: “This is the sound of the Pound… the higher the note, the stronger the Pound.” This sonification is a good example of training the listener, because it succinctly provides the “vocabulary” up front.

• “LISTEN: 1,200 Years of Earth's Climate, Transformed into Sound” (KQED Science Podcast, Jan 8, 2018) — This sonification conveys average global temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the course of 1,200 years. As the sonification begins, the meaning of the sonic components is described in conversation format between the interviewer and creators of the sonification. Temperature is indicated by continuously rising pitch, and CO2 levels are indicated by plucked string activity. The listener is hearing and learning simultaneously, as additional context is provided.

Have you ever listened to the podcast Song Exploder? In this podcast, the host Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians to reveal the origin story behind a song, introducing the isolated stems in a chronological story. This gives the listener a chance to become familiar with the components of the song before hearing the macro composition. By the end of the episode, the entire song is played, and all of those parts come together in illuminating harmony. Sonification storytellers can take a similar approach with their audiences, presenting the isolated aspects of the audio and attaching meaning to each of them. This listener is thus armed with the “vocabulary” needed to absorb real meaning from the sonification.

On Marketplace, Kai Ryssdal and Jordan-Wirfs Brock discuss the idea of training the listener ("What sound does a volatile stock market make?" at 1:00).