Towards Multimodal Exploratory Data Analysis: SoniScope as a Prototypical Implementation

Abstract

The metaphor of auscultating with a stethoscope can be an inspiration to combine visualization and sonification for exploratory data analysis. This paper presents SoniScope, a multimodal approach and its prototypical implementation based on this metaphor. It combines a scatterplot with an interactive parameter mapping sonification, thereby conveying additional information about items that were selected with a visual lens. SoniScope explores several design options for the shape of its lens and the sorting of the selected items for subsequent sonification. Furthermore, the open-source prototype serves as a blueprint framework for how to combine D3.js visualization and SuperCollider sonification in the Jupyter notebook environment.