Web Sonification Sandbox - an Easy-to-Use Web Application for Sonifying Data and Equations

Auditory and multimodal presentation of data (“auditory graphs”) can allow for discoveries in a data set that are sometimes impossible with visual-only inspection. At the same time, multimodal graphs can make data, and the STEM fields that rely on them, more accessible to a much broader range of people, including many with disabilities. There have been a variety of software tools developed to turn data into sound, including the widely-used Sonification Sandbox, but there remains a need for simple, powerful, and more accessible tool for the construction and manipulation of multimodal graphs. Web-based audio functionality is now at the point where it can be leveraged to provide just such a tool. Thus, we developed a web application, the Web Sonification Sandbox (or simply the Web Sandbox), that allows users to create and manipulate multimodal graphs that convey information through both sonification and visualization. The Web Sandbox is designed to be usable by individuals with no technical or musical expertise, which separates it from existing software. The easy-to-use nature of the Web Sandbox, combined with its multimodal nature, allow it to be a maximally accessible application by a diverse audience of users. Nevertheless, the application is also powerful and flexible enough to support advanced users.