1. FESR www.trigrid.it Trinacria Grid Virtual Laboratory Sonificazione di dati scientifici Roberto Barbera (a nome di Domenico Vicinanza) Università di Catania e INFN Primo Workshop TriGrid VL Catania, 13.03.2006

2. Catania, Primo Workshop TriGrid VL, 13.03.2006 2 Music for Science: Data Sonification on Grid Data sonification is the representation of data by sound signals. It can be considered as the acoustic counterpart of data graphic visualization, a mathema- tical mapping of information from data sets to sounds. Data sonification is currently used in several fields, for different purposes: science and engineering, education and training, mainly as data analysis and interpretation tool. Data sonification has been applied to geophysical data collected by a digital seismograph placed on the Etna volcano in Italy (courtesy of INGV). The hope is to learn more about eruption dynamics from patterns in sonograms.

3. Motivations Sonic representations are particularly useful when dealing with complex, high-dimensional data, or in data monitoring tasks where it is practically impossible to use the visual inspection. Patterns and/or trends recognizing through sound, (in particular for some categories of evolutions, which were hardly perceivable otherwise).

4. Catania, Primo Workshop TriGrid VL, 13.03.2006 4 Seismograms Sonification (15’ of data = 20h of CPU!) Example of audible seismogram (just at the start of the eruption) Corresponding sonogram Spectral lines ↔ Regular patterns

5. Seismograms Melodisation

8. Melodies can then be analized with mathematical tools to look for patterns and self-similarities … have you ever heard a volcano playing on a piano ?

9. Catania, Primo Workshop TriGrid VL, 13.03.2006 9 Grid for Art: 3D Data Visualization Letters in a text are associated to graphical objects such as spheres. Radii, indexes of reflection and refraction, light diffusion properties, positions in the space are associated to the position of the letters in the english alphabet. NA4 Generic Applications

10. Catania, Primo Workshop TriGrid VL, 13.03.2006 10 A new kind of cryptography is born!