An Auditory Display for Exploratory Visualization of Multidimensional Data

This paper describes an auditory display being developed for a workstation designed to facilitate the visualization of multidimensional data. To establish the context of this work, the paper first discusses the psychophysical basis for using sound to represent multidimensional data, surveys the related literature, and describes the novel graphical technique employed by the workstation to display multidimensional data visually. Next, it gives an overview of the auditory display and its relationship to the visual display, emphasizing the roles played by the apparent location of sound sources and the repetition of sounds in time. Finally, the paper discusses the current prototype sound system and some of the difficulties to be faced in implementing the proposed facility. This work is being done as part of the Exploratory Visualization (Exvis) project at the University of Lowell.