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AI & Soc (2012) 27:213222 DOI 10.1007/s00146-011-0341-7
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Aesthetic strategies in sonication
Florian Grond Thomas Hermann
Received: 18 April 2011 / Accepted: 1 August 2011 / Published online: 30 August 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011
Abstract Sound can be listened to in various ways and with different intentions. Multiple factors inuence how and what we perceive when listening to sound. Sonication, the acoustic representation of data, is in essence just sound. It functions as sonication only if we make sure to listen attentively in order to access the abstract information it contains. This is difcult to accomplish since sound always calls the listeners attention to concretewhether natural or musicalpoints of references. Important aspects determining how we listen to sonication are discussed in this paper: elicited sounds, repeated sounds, conceptual sounds, technologically mediated sounds, melodic sounds, familiar sounds, multimodal sounds and vocal sounds. We discuss how these aspects help the listener engage with the sound, but also how they can become points of reference in and of themselves. The various sonic qualities employed in sonication can potentially open but also risk closing doors to the accessibility and perceptibility of the sonied data.
Keywords Sonication Aesthetics Historic context
1 Introduction
Sonication, today, is an interdisciplinary practice ranging from scientic applications to sound art and composition. Following an early denition by Kramer (1994), it is often understood in practical terms as representing data with non-speech sound. This characterization, however, is
rather coarse and merely addresses challenges in designing, composing or programming sonications. From a musical perspective, the sonication of data continues from where mimesis, in the tradition of program music and in the indexical function of sound recording, ends. From the perspective of the theory of knowledge and the history of science, we can speak of sonication when sound is used as a medium that represents more than just itself. In other words, sound becomes sonication when it can claim to possess explanatory powers: when it is neither solely music nor serves as mere illustration. Although there are historic and contemporary examples in which sound is the medium used to promote scientic insights, the word insight itself shows how much language metaphors related to knowledge production point to the primacy of vision. We will examine historic...