A Web Guide to Perceptually Congruent Sonification

Sonification is an increasingly popular mechanism for data exploration, promoting the need for a greater understanding of human auditory perception and of how sonified information is designed, presented, and interpreted. In this paper, perceptual modelling is used to explore and demonstrate how perceptual phenomena are accounted for in sonification design. The framework, extracted from a larger body of work, links perceptual phenomena such as stream segregation to sonification mappings to provide a systematic approach to identifying and addressing perceptually-driven problems in applied sonification. A web guide functions to situate and guide designers through the complex theoretical constituents of auditory perception incorporated in the Perceptually Congruent Sonification (PerCS) framework. This web guide (hosted on sonification.ie) highlights and summarises the perceptual phenomena most relevant to sonification design and uses simple audio-visual interactions to demonstrate their effect. Preliminary qualitative feedback from a brief survey elucidates a small number of end-user concerns and comments.