WebSonify: Ambient aural display of real-time data

Nicholas Violi

Data visualization as a field has made tremendous progress in exploring ways to investigate, interrogate, and comprehend abstract data by visual means. For all its benefits, data visualization has some drawbacks when it comes to live, streaming data.

Some tools have attempted to solve this problem using sonification -- translating live data to sound or noise -- but these devices traditionally have not attempted to produce sound that is interesting, varying, or aesthetically pleasing.

Nick will present a tool he created in which he connected a website's live user data to the Web Audio API to create a procedurally-generated and (theoretically) infinite "song" representing the site's traffic patterns. He will reflect on the potential for using sound and music as a medium for developing an intuitive understanding of streaming data.