Summer of Math Exposition

This like this sound perspective of math.

This was amazing. The subject matter was really clearly motivated with real world examples, and I imagine most mathematically inclined people could listen to this with very little barrier. The author takes us, via listening, through a number of equations and sets of data. I found the content very interesting, and even the idea of representing data in a novel way encourages considering questioning what data actually is. The link to climate change at the end was an excellent finish. I really enjoyed listening to this.

i appreciate the work

Using sounds to let people feel the function, rather than using visuals. This is definitely a novel idea, and very ASMR-y. It definitely gave a different perspective for me to feel the function. Especially with the stereo sounds. The most useful one for me was the Lorentz attractor, others still feel less class compared to visuals for me.

I wasn’t quite satisfied with motivation behind the sonification. The creator simply said ‘why not’ which is a valid personal motivation, but it isn’t the best way to spread these types of ideas to new audiences. I would have found it interesting if an example was given of a situation in which sonification is more effective than visualization. However, in each of the examples that were given, I thought of the visual counterpart, and I thought that it was always more effective to visualize. The clarity was pretty good, but I would steer away from the magnetic field example, for someone with little to no physics background it could be confusing. As far as novelty, I thought that its potential aid to the visually impaired was interesting, and it could be a useful thing to share.

The medium is so cool. Love the fact it’s soundcloud. May have also worked as a video without detracting too much. Great accessibility too. Shared with my mum who has previously taught blind students math

Liked the unique approach to visualise the sound of functions. I feel like adding visuals to the audio would help a lot as people would be able to follow along as they are hearing. I also think that there should also be more real world examples near the end. I imagine this could also help visually impaired people to understand data. I feel this would have been good to mention.

Innovative approach to use sound to convey how signals can be interpreted. The communication was clear and the author did a good job of relating signals to sounds. However, without the visuals, I was left sort of guessing about what the signals looked like and what kind of signals should I map onto the sounds beind described. However, I do recognize that this kind of an explanation can perhaps be utilized nicely for people who are visually impaired.

A great introduction to a fascinating concept. The benefits of data sonification are clear for people with visual impairments, and I can certainly believe that it can even benefit some conceptualizations of data for sighted people. However, I will admit that the examples actually present in the audio were not fully convincing in themselves, as many of the examples used objects with relatively simple and intuitive visual representations as a point of reference. This simplicity was probably an intentional choice for clarity, but if there were more complicated examples that would have more clearly represented the benefits of data sonification, I would have liked to hear them. I This is certainly a novel concept to me, as I’ve never seen discussion of this topic before. I’ll definitely keep this tucked away in my mind moving forward, and I’d be interested if this creator ever posted a follow-up. I remember the creator mentioning that the methods present in this audio are not the only ones, so it would be great to be exposed to other methods.

I’m not convinced from the examples provided sound will lead to better understanding of the data. For effective communication of ideas everyone needs to agree on a standard. I could easily define sine to oscillate at a different rate to you and have two different sounds for the same thing. How can I tell the difference between sin and cos or how far I am from the origin? How would I encode the intersection of two different functions? With your Lorenz system which of the variables was I listening to or was I listening to some combination of the variables? I have no idea what parameters you used for the constants. Finally, I need to do significant processing of the data to create a sound I can hear, my choices in doing this will have a huge impact on what I hear and the interpretation of the data, potentially allowing any interpenetration.