Interactive software for the sonification of neuronal activity

We present a software for the sonification of neuronal activity acquired by calcium imaging of neurons in the brain of zebrafish larvae. The objective was to facilitate the observation of the temporal and spatial patterns of activity as well as the synchronous phenomena between different neurons. The parameter mapping approach was used. The method we present relies on manually drawn regions of interest (ROI), whereby, the average fluorescent values of the ROIs are computed to drive FM synthesis parameters. The ROIs represent neurons and each ROI is associated with a FM synthesizer producing sound signal. An interface was developed to allow one to tune the parameters of the sonification and manage the data sets. This paper presents the different mapping that were tested, their implementation in the software, and the interface that was developed.