Sonification and the Digital Divide

Abstract

Historically, ‘Western Culture’ has been predominantly visuocentric tending to treat sound as an immaterial and secondary phenomenon. The roots of this bias can be traced back through the works of Kant and Hume to classical Pythagorean thought that reduces sound to the sum of its mathematical and mechanical components. Sound was often thought of as something material objects do, rather than a material object in and of itself. With the advent of 20th century analog recording technologies, sound for the first time became disembodied from its sources and worthy of treatment as a material in and of itself. This has led to interesting developments in the arts and sciences. Thanks to modern developments in digital technology sound has become a tangible, malleable material. Sonification is the process of representing computer data using digital sound. It is used in situations where the visual medium comes up short.