Investigating geometric data with sound

This paper describes our work in the interdisciplinary areas of computational topology and data sonification. The goal of our ongoing research is to discover new methods for "visualizing" large structures and higher dimensional structures—data that is difficult or impossible to render with standard methods. To this end we are researching ways to use audio to replace or supplement graphics. Both n-dimensional data sets (n > 3) and very large 3dimensional data sets suffer in obvious ways from mappings to graphical domains; audio domains, on the other hand, are dimension-free and have the potential to portray very complex data. Applications for this work are found in computational biology, physics, theory of computation, and other areas, including music composition.