Gordon Monro (2004). “What are you really thinking?” In Barrass, S. (ed.), Listening to the Mind Listening: Concert of ICAD 2004 The 10th Meeting of the International Conference on Auditory Display. Sydney, Australia.

This piece sonifies all 26 channels of EEG data and a further 10 channels of data recording heart rate, skin conductance, and other measures.  Each channel of EEG data was mapped to a stream of tones in which each tone had a frequency 30 times the centre frequency of the band in which activity on that EEG electrode channel was taking place. The other measures were used further modify the sounds.

The overall effect is a piece that is very rich and engaging which clearly displays the brain's activity. The chosen sonification strategy leads to a strong aesthetic experience but which is faithful to the full data set. Monro (a digital media artist) intentionally approached the task as a sonification problem rather than a compositional one but where the end result was still "interesting to listen to" (personal communication). The piece demonstrates what can be achieved in sonification when a strong aesthetic strategy is married to precise data to sound mappings.

Hans van Raaij (2004). “Listening to the mind listening.” In Barrass, S. (ed.), Listening to the Mind Listening: Concert of ICAD 2004 The 10th Meeting of the International Conference on Auditory Display. Sydney, Australia.

This piece uses the same data set as Monro's but is a very different experience; it comes across as a kind of free jazz improvisation. Van Raaij sampled the data set to reduce it tenfold and performed a further reduction by sonifying only three of the available 36 channels of data. The data ranges themselves were then compressed to flatten out the very high and low values. Van Raaij (who describes himself as “not a scientist”) approached the task by avoiding a direct one-to-one translation of each data point to a corresponding tone in order to compose “musically interesting music” (personal communication). The result is a higher level representation of the data than Monro's piece but one in which the large scale changes in the data are still evident.

The full 'programme notes' for these two pieces can be found at
http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/concert/Monro.pdf and
http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/concert/HansVanRaaij.pdf

Yolande Harris, “Satellite Sounders”
Yolande Harris Sun Run Sun: Satellite Sounding (2009) 3’36”

Harris’s “Satellite Sounders” are mobile devices that sonify the GPS navigation data broadcast by overhead satellites. As the listener walks around the environment the audio changes as the data are updated.

The first four pieces presented here are recordings (“Satellite Soundings”) made in four different locations: Singapore, Genova, Los Angeles, and at sea. The fifth is a recording of people interacting with a Satellite Sounder. All the pieces clearly demonstrate the differences in satellite activity and availability at different locations. Harris’s motivation here is not the scientific sonification of data, indeed she describes the results as musical compositions. Harris is seeking to explore “the relationship between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position” (http://yolandeharris.net/?nk_work=sun-run-sun-satellite-sounders). The result is a very engaging aural experience that clearly has a strong and direct relationship to the data.