Audification is the “direct data translation of a data waveform to the audible domain for purposes of monitoring and comprehension” (Kramer, 1994). The process can be refined to mapping a data signal to an amplitude (Dombois and Eckel, 2011).
We might think of instruments like a seismographs or Geiger counters. Audification is useful is time is an immediate concern, but you may need to alter either time or frequency to hear the data (Walker and Nees, 2011).
An example comes from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiments or Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (2016).
Musification is the application of musical terms, such polyphony, to the representation (Coop, 2016).
The boundaries between these and sonification are some what porous.
Parameter-Based Sonification, the association of the information with an audio parameter, is used for readings of static objects to create sonic readings that respond to a specific stimulus from the data (Grond and Berger, 2016)
Model-Based Sonification is where models create and drive the processes but without making sound until receiving an interaction, describes a system’s evolution and moves away from input / output towards an object that develops in response to human- or machine-driven processes (Hermann, 2016).
A newer form of sonification, Open Sonification, encourages us to work with other forms of data and results coming from sound. The approach focuses on the act of making sound and constructing a narrative. In addition to be analytical, it encourages taking a perspective or provide a commentary on the data.