Data sonification
An interestesting video from the Geography department at the University of Minnesota. The cellist, Minnesota student Daniel Crawford, plays the historical earth mean temperature record converted to music
One difficulty with sonic display of data is scaling: the video uses a semitone for 0.03 Celsius, but that seems like quite a big pitch change for a barely-measurable temperature difference. The scaling gives a range of three octaves (rather more than a typical singers voice) for just over 1 degree, which is a meaningful but not catastrophic change in temperature. I think it’s fair to say the pitch scaling is a bit exaggerated.
It’s hard to say what would be appropriate, since we don’t have the research and practical experience that informs axis choices for graphs. One approach might be to take advantage of vibrato in cello performance, and scale so that the minimum measurement uncertainty is the same as the vibrato variation. The Google suggests that cello vibrato is about 1/5 to 1/4 semitone, and mapping this to a minimum confidence interval width (from the Berkeley data) of 0.04C gives a scaling of 0.16 to 0.2 degrees per semitone, or a total range for the whole piece of about half an octave.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »