Pyschology of Sonification

Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics is the study of the human response to sound. It explores how the ear and the brain work together to interpret sound and therefore allows humans to understand what they hear.

There are many different ways that psychoacoustics can help us to understand sound. Elements of music, such as those listed below, often play a huge contribution to our interpretation and opinions of different sounds.

• Pitch
• Volume
• Tonality
• Tempo
• Texture
• Articulation

It is often easy to determine whether a sound is good or bad. Elements such as a major tonality, a higher pitch and faster tempo would usually provoke a happier response in humans, rather than sound with minor tonality, lower pitch, slower tempo and legato/smooth notes, which would provoke a dark or sad response.

How we used this?

After researching psychoacoustics, we were able to apply certain elements to our code in order to create sounds that accurately reflect the images.