SONIFICATION ABSTRAITE/SONIFICATION CONCR` ETE: AN 'ÆSTHETIC PERSPECTIVE SPACE' FOR CLASSIFYING AUDITORY DISPLAYS IN THE ARS MUSICA DOMAIN

his paper discusses æsthetic issues of sonifications and the re- lationships between sonification (ars informatica) and music & sound art (ars musica). It is posited that many sonifications have suffered from poor internal ecological validity which makes listen- ing more difficult, thereby resulting in poorer data extraction and inference on the part of the listener. Lessons are drawn from the electroacoustic music and musique concre`te communities as it is argued that it is not instructive to distinguish between sonifications and music/sound art. Edgard Vare`se defined music as organised sound, and sonifi- cations organise sound to reflect mimetically the thing being soni- fied. Therefore, an æsthetic perspective space onto which sonifica- tions and musical compositions alike can be mapped is proposed. The resultant map allows sonifications to be compared with works in the ars musica domain with which they share characteristics. The æsthetics of those ars musica counterparts can then be interro- gated revealing useful design and organisation constructs that can be used to improve the sonifications' communicative ability.