Babble online applying statistics and design to sonify the internet.pdfVIP

Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Auditory Display, Espoo, Finland, July 29- August 1, 2001 BABBLE ONLINE: APPLYING STATISTICS AND DESIGN TO SONIFY THE INTERNET M. H. Hansen B. Rubin Bell Laboratories EAR Studio Murray Hill, New Jersey New York City, New York cocteau@ benrubin@ ABSTRACT we discuss the broad goals of our collaboration and examine soni- fication from both an artistic as well as a data analytic perspective. A statistician (Hansen) and a media artist (Rubin) investigate the In this paper, we examine the use of auditory displays in under- application of statistical methods and sound-design principles to standing large-scale Internet communications. the real-time sonification of Internet communications. This paper presents results from two applications: the sonification of brows- ing activity on Lucent’s Web site, and the sonification of a large 2. EXAMPLES number of Internet chat sites in real-time. These experiments sug- gest new ways to experience the diverse and dynamic data streams 2.1. Web site traffic generated by modern data networks. As an art-technology collab- oration, the project outcomes range from the creation of art instal- Every day, large Web sites like Yahoo attract hundreds of thou- lations to the development of practical monitoring platforms. This sands of visitors. During active periods, there can be thousands paper discusses the interplay between these two per