<story><title>Introducing choir.io</title><url>http://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>goodmachine</author><text>This is an excellent project, congrats.&lt;p&gt;However, it is in no sense &amp;quot;new or unique&amp;quot; as the authors suggest. Extensive (20+ years) of research literature on data sonification is out there, so...&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.icad.org/knowledgebase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.icad.org&amp;#x2F;knowledgebase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note also (very many) art-led sonification projects, turning everything from live IP traffic to gene-sequence or x-ray astronomy datasets, carried out since the early 90s. Prix Ars Electronica may be a good place to look for these.&lt;p&gt;My summary of the field in general, FWIW, is this - it&amp;#x27;s trivial to turn a realtime data stream into sound. It&amp;#x27;s slightly harder to turn the stream into either a) music or b) non-dissonant sound streams, and it&amp;#x27;s very hard indeed to create a &lt;i&gt;legible&lt;/i&gt; (ie useful, reversible) general purpose sonification framework, because auditory discrimination abilities vary so widely from individual to individual and are highly context-dependent.&lt;p&gt;Of course, because sound exists in time not space, there&amp;#x27;s no simple back-comparison of data with and relative to itself, as when one looks at a visual graph. Listeners rely on shaky old human memory: did I hear that before? Was it lower, louder? And so on.&lt;p&gt;That said, I remain fascinated by the area and propose that a sonic markup language for the web would be interesting.&lt;p&gt;Sneaky plug: My current project (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chirp.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;chirp.io&lt;/a&gt;) began by looking at &amp;#x27;ambient alerts&amp;#x27; until we reached the point above, and decided to put machine-readable data into sound, instead of attaching sound to data for humans.&lt;p&gt;Good luck, and I very much look forward to hearing more!</text></comment>
<story><title>Introducing choir.io</title><url>http://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jpalomaki</author><text>Very interesting.&lt;p&gt;Watching log files scroll by I have noticed that once you have stared at them for too long you start recognizing the patterns. There&amp;#x27;s not enough time you read everything that scrolls by you quite often you just know that now something is out of place.&lt;p&gt;Maybe these soundscapes could provide something similar in a non obtrusive way. Just by listening your brain would be wired to expect certain sounds as consequence for certain actions. If something goes wrong, you would just know it.&lt;p&gt;I think one challenges is how to take something like this into use. Setting up the the triggers and configuring the sounds feels like too much trouble (&amp;quot;What is the correct sound for this event&amp;quot;). Might be just better to take some ready provided set and learn the sounds.</text></comment>