Sound for the exploration of space physics data

Current analysis techniques for space physics 2D numerical data are based on scruti-nising the data with the eyes. Space physics data sets acquired from the natural lab of the interstellar medium may contain events that may be masked by noise making it difficult to identify. This thesis presents research on the use of sound as an adjunct to current data visualisation techniques to explore, analyse and augment signatures in space physics data. This research presents a new sonification technique to decom-pose a space physics data set into different components (frequency, oscillatory modes, etc…) of interest, and its use as an adjunct to data visualisation to explore and analyse space science data sets which are characterised by non-linearity (a system which does not satisfy the superposition principle, or whose output is not propor-tional to its input). Integrating aspects of multisensory perceptualization, human at tention mechanisms, the question addressed by this dissertation is: Does sound used as an adjunct to current data visualisation, augment the perception of signatures in space physics data masked by noise? To answer this question, the following additional questions had to be answered: a) Is sound used as an adjunct to visualisation effective in increasing sensi-tivity to signals occurring at attended, unattended, unexpected locations, extended in space, when the occurrence of the signal is in presence of a dynamically changing competing cognitive load (noise), that makes the signal visually ambiguous? b) How can multimodal perceptualization (sound as an adjunct to visualisa-tion) and attention control mechanisms, be combined to help allocate at-tention to identify visually ambiguous signals? One aim of these questions is to investigate the effectiveness of the use of sound to-gether with visual display to increase sensitivity to signal detection in presence of visual noise in the data as compared to visual display only. Radio, particle, wave and high energy