Listen to Your Data!
Bill Shander
Author of "Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask", keynote speaker, workshop leader, LinkedIn Learning Instructor. Information design, data storytelling & visualization, creativity.
This series is all about the visual experience. It's literally in the title! My entire career has been built on creating visual experiences. And humans are primarily visual creatures and visual learners. Visuals are the best!
But...
There are other senses. And if I step back from my bias for the visual, and really think about it, I remember how intimately connected we are to other senses as well. The sense of smell is said to trigger the most powerful memories. Taste provides a sensual pleasure and is deeply rooted in various survival mechanisms. Touch is extremely sensitive–your fingertips can detect something as thin as half the width of a human hair–which keeps us safe and helps us engage with our world and each other. And humans react more quickly to sound than to visuals, which is why we duck instinctively at a loud sound.
But sound is about more than speed. Our brains are wired to engage with so many different aspects of sound. And we have a rich vocabulary to describe different sounds - like pitch, tone, timbre, volume, rhythm, etc. We connect with sound (and particularly music) in a way that we just don't with touch, for instance. Music can be as evocative as smell for memories and, of course, it can make you move almost against your will.
For all of these reasons, and more, the practice of data sonification is having a moment. We can encode data in sound just like we can encode it in visuals. And it can bring emotion and immersion to a data experience in a way that is difficult to do with visuals.
Lesson: Data Sonification
In this lesson, I briefly introduce the topic of data sonification, and take a brief interlude at my 8th grade dance!
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Listen: Miriam Quick and Duncan Geere on Data Sonification
In this discussion, Miriam and Duncan share their thoughts and experiences with data sonification, examples for you to learn more about it, and some nuanced thoughts on topics like visual bias, storytelling, emotion, immersion and the constraints and limits of sonification.
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Learn more about data storytelling and visualization via my other LinkedIn Learning courses.