Listening to Data
As part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded COVID-Inspired Data Science Education through Epidemiology (CIDSEE) project, Tumblehome has been collaborating with the Concord Consortium for more than two years to develop a data sonification plugin for their free Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP).
So what is data sonification? It means translating data into sound. For example, in addition to looking at a graph of how COVID infections changed over the course of a month, you can also hear a representation of the data. Higher pitches represent dates with more COVID infections, and lower pitches represent dates with fewer daily infections. Data sonification can be helpful for people who are more oriented to sound than visuals, and can provide perspectives that you might not get by just looking at a graph alone.
Video showing an example of the Sonify plugin in CODAP. Make sure your sound is on when you play it! This activity (comparing daily and total COVID infections in Mexico) is available at https://learn.concord.org/cidsee. You may also directly open the CODAP document with this data at http://bit.ly/4oZtD48
As the CIDSEE project comes to a close, we’re happy to report there is a revised plugin called Sonify built into CODAP that anyone can use for free to sonify data. To open the Sonify plugin in a new or existing CODAP document, you should:
Click on “Plugins” on the top toolbar.
Select “Story Telling” from the drop-down menu, followed by “Sonify” (see image below, left).
Follow the instructions in the image below (right) to create a graph and sonify your data.
Images showing how to open and use the built-in Sonify plugin in a new or existing CODAP document. Before following the instructions on the right, you must first have data in a table in CODAP including at least one time attribute (such as days, years, dates, etc.) and at least one numeric attribute that you are interested in sonifying. You can find a more detailed tutorial on how to use Sonify at https://learn.concord.org/cidsee
The sonification plugin can be be used with numeric data that change over time (time-series data), and is designed for learners in grades 6–12 and up. Tumblehome helped Concord Consortium create a tutorial on how to use the Sonify plugin, as well as to develop seven guided activities on sonifying infectious disease data and climate data in CODAP, all of which are in Concord’s STEM Resource Finder at https://learn.concord.org/cidsee.
Photo of Data Detectives Club participants sonifying COVID data with kazoos. Photo shared with permission.
You don’t need an account to try out the tutorial or activities, but if you’d like to assign or share them with students, you need to select “register” to create a free account or select “log in” at the top of the page in the STEM Resource Finder. You can find the shared view links to the CODAP documents used in these activities at the end of this blog post.
Tumblehome first became interested in the potential of data sonification for our Data Detectives Clubs for middle school youth in early 2022 after watching a viral video of Tobias Jäck scat singing his way through COVID case graphs for various countries. That spring, we tested out having students use kazoos to “play” their own COVID data sonifications. Kazoos, while fun, were limited in their use for sonifying data!
We were already collaborating with the Concord Consortium to use CODAP in Data Detectives Clubs, and we received supplemental NSF funding to develop and expand sonification activities in our Clubs as well as to research how sonification enhances how students understand data.
As a key part of this initiative, Concord staff Bill Finzer and Dan Damelin and consultants Takahiko Tsuchiya and Jonathan Sandoe revised a prototype of the CODAP sonification plugin that was created before the CIDSEE project. To help guide plugin development and further our research, we presented data in CODAP coupled with various versions of the Sonify plugin to 32 middle school students over the next two years .
To do this, we worked with students in focus groups, in three rounds of one-on-one interviews, and in a five-session afterschool program. We also added CODAP sonification activities to the Data Detectives Clubs in fall 2023, and the curriculum now includes an activity sonifying changes in coronavirus particle concentrations in wastewater over six weeks in four Massachusetts counties (see the last activity in the list).
Our research on using sonification in CODAP with middle school youth is discussed in a winter 2025 @Concord newsletter article. What did we learn?
Students found sonification engaging as a new way to interact with data, and most students understood the basics of how sonification works.
Students also thought it was helpful that Sonify enables you to speed up or slow down the playback and has a visual line that slides across the graph to make it clear what part of the graph is playing at any given moment.
Most students thought it was hard to interpret data through sound alone, and wanted to see the graph and hear the sonification at the same time to make sense of the data.
More of our research findings will be published in early 2026 in a forthcoming Science Scope article titled “Adding Sound to Graphs of Data that Change over Time.”
We invite you to use the Sonify plugin and the resources developed around it, and let us know what you and your students discover!
Shared-view links to CODAP documents to try Sonify in (you can also explore sonifying these datasets through guided activities at learn.concord.org/cidsee):
Olympic gold high jump heights (1896–2024)
Polio infections in Nigeria (1981–2023)
Mauna Loa CO2 data (1958–2018)
US and Canadian measles cases (2010–2025)
New England climate data (1940-2024)
Mexico COVID infections (spring 2020)
Massachusetts COVID wastewater data (fall 2023)
Funding details: The project reported on in this blog post was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), grant number DRL-2313212. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations presented are only those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
