Towards a unified terminology for sonification and visualization

Both sonification and visualization convey information about data by effectively using our human perceptual system, but their ways to transform the data differ. Over the past 30 years, the sonification community has demanded a holistic perspective on data representation, including audio-visual analysis, several times. A design theory of audio-visual analysis would be a relevant step in this direction. An indispensable foundation for this endeavor is a terminology describing the combined design space. To build a bridge between the domains, we adopt three of the established theoretical constructs from visualization theory for the field of sonification. The three constructs are the spatial substrate, the visual mark, and the visual channel. In our model, we choose time to be the temporal substrate of sonification. Auditory marks are then positioned in time, such as visual marks are positioned in space. Auditory channels are encoded into auditory marks to convey information. The proposed definitions allow discussing visualization and sonification designs as well as multi-modal designs based on a common terminology. While the identified terminology can support audio-visual analytics research, it also provides a new perspective on sonification theory itself.