Research Team Explores Sonification
A dance performance using sonification took place in the Expressive Technologies Studio in the Frost Center on June 6. Photo by Nick Wilson.
June 2025 / NEWS STORY
by Nick Wilson
Applying creative approaches to depict information that veers from traditional data visualization methods, Cal Poly faculty and student researchers are exploring the use of auditory tools to describe facts and figures.
Common examples of sonification, or using sound to represent data, include the beeps of a pedestrian sidewalk and the clicks of a Geiger counter to detect and measure radiation.
Statistics Assistant Professor Julia Schedler said one of the motivations for exploring sonification emerged from adapting a book published by Cal Poly Statistics Department faculty members Allan Rossman, Beth Chance and Soma Roy for a web-native platform.
The online version of the book on simulation-based inferences needed to meet accessibility requirements, and sound and music emerged as an idea for how best to represent some of the alternative text. She wanted to explore the idea further and see what might work for any consumer of data-driven presentations as well.
“If someone is vision-impaired, either completely blind or can’t see the way most of us do, adding sound to what we would typically do visually could be an alternate way for someone to access information,” Scheduler said. “I’ve been curious generally as well about how we can enhance introductory statistics education and also create more accessible perceptualizations of data and make things easier for someone to understand.”
Schedler’s research on sonification has involved applying musicality (pitch, rhythm and tone) to describe variation in tree canopy coverage, severe heat incidence, asthma-related emergency visits, annual average air pollution and percent of population in poverty on the Central Coast. She has written code using octaves on the piano to express distribution differences for a trained ear.
“Past research from the 1990s showed this is kind of mixed on whether people can actually do this, but there hasn’t been done a lot on it since, and so I think it's just really cool to look into this topic more,” Schedler said.
Cal Poly statistics major Donya Behroozi, a Frost Research Scholar, has worked under the guidance of Schedler and statistics faculty member Sinem Demirci to conduct surveys on the impacts of matching sound to data.
“We were interested in investigating whether listening to sonified data can elicit an emotional response from listeners the same way music does,” Behroozi said. “An upbeat pop song might make someone feel happy, while another person could listen to an angry heavy metal song to get their frustrations out.”
The research entailed surveying 120 undergraduate students in introductory statistics courses from engineering and business disciplines on their emotional response to both simulated data using R and real data using San Luis Obispo County temperatures in December, in the form of boxplots, or graphs summarizing a set of data. Participants were asked questions about identifying the shapes of the distributions and their emotional responses.
“While all distributions were primarily composed of consonant (pleasant-sounding) intervals, we did not observe a corresponding increase in ‘happy’ responses,” Behroozi noted about the results of the work. “Although no significant relationship was found between data type and emotional response, it is noteworthy that several students reported emotional response other than ‘neutral.’”
Behroozi said that the unfamiliar topic was quite daunting at first, but she grew to enjoy learning about connections between stats and music. Behroozi presented her work at the American Statistical Association’s Symposium on Data Science and Statistics held in Utah April 29-May 2 and at the Bailey College Student Research Conference held May 15-16.
Additionally, collaborating with Jeanine Scaramozzino, Bailey College’s librarian, Behroozi’s work has been displayed in Fisher Science building as part of the Coastal California Classroom Research Collective, a shared collaboration among students, faculty, staff and community members that merges art and science.
Other work includes a visual display of native plants to show Central Coast botanical records over the course of time, reflecting seasonal differences, and nature journaling, involving artistic renderings of nature from observation of surroundings.
A June 6 performance involving student dancers at Cal Poly’s Expressive Technologies Studio in the William and Linda Frost Center for Research and Innovation synchronized music, dance and San Luis Obispo County temperature data from 1909-2025. For Schedler, sonification has been an ongoing passion project for the past six years because of her love for music and statistics.
“I just like expressing music, which has always been a part of my life, so I just thought ‘How can I use it?” Schedler said.
