The broad practice of turning the intrinsic properties or dynamic behaviors of materials—their stress under load, thermal expansion, nanoscale vibrations, or degradation over time—into sound. This allows engineers to "listen for failure" in bridges or airplane wings, or for artists to create installations where a sculpture's sound changes as it rusts or bends.
Sonification of Materials Example: To test a new carbon fiber alloy, engineers attach sensors and sonify the material's stress during load tests. A clean, harmonic sound indicates even stress distribution. The sudden emergence of a grinding, dissonant frequency directly signals the onset of a micro-fracture long before it's visible, providing an acoustic early-warning system.
The process of translating quantitative data (numbers, measurements) into non-speech audio, using sound parameters like pitch, volume, tempo, and timbre to represent different variables. It turns spreadsheets into symphonies, allowing patterns, trends, and anomalies in datasets to be perceived through the human ear, which can sometimes detect subtle rhythms and shifts that the eye might miss in a graph.
Data Sonification Example: A climate scientist sonifies 100 years of Arctic temperature data, mapping each year to a note. Rising temperatures cause a slow, creeping rise in pitch. The listener hears a haunting, accelerating upward glissando over the century, making the abstract trend of global warming viscerally, emotionally audible in a way a line chart often isn't.