Movement Sonification Toolkit: Enabling Non-Sound Experts to Create Movement Data Sonifications
Michael Reichmann, Vincent van Rheden, Antoni Rayzhekov, Thomas Grah, Oliver Jung, Alexander Meschtscherjakov (2025): Movement Sonification Toolkit: Enabling Non-Sound Experts to Create Movement Data Sonifications In: SportsHCI '25: Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction and Sports, Article No.: 34, Pages 1 - 6.
The use of sonification, the transformation of data into non-speech sound, holds strong potential for enhancing physical performance in sports and movement-based activities. However, literature reveals that most sonification systems have been, or need to be, custom-built to serve a specific purpose. This results in existing systems often being limited: they require some level of programming expertise, are tailored to narrow use cases, or lack compatibility with real-time data. While numerous toolkits exist that aim to simplify the creation of sonifications, there are no general-purpose toolkits specifically designed for the sports and movement domain. These barriers make it difficult for researchers working in this domain, such as sports scientists or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers, to effectively design sonification strategies. In this paper, we present a modular sonification toolkit that maps pre-recorded movement data to sound parameters across multiple sound design modules, with future support for real-time data processing under development.
