Hear Her Fear: Data Sonification for Sensitizing Society on Crime Against Women in India
This work addresses the need for more engaging data representation to sensitize society about crime against women in India, though it is incremental in applying existing sonification techniques to this specific social issue.
The authors tackled the problem of representing crime data against women in India by developing a data sonification system that uses sound parameters and auditory icons like women's screams to create an immersive experience, and a user study with 20 participants showed they could easily comprehend trends and found it impactful.
Data sonification is a means of representing data through sound and has been utilized in a variety of applications. Crime against women has been a rising concern in India. We explore the potential of data sonification to provide an immersive engagement with sensitive data on crime against women in Indian states. The data for nine crime categories covering thirty-five Indian states over a period of twelve years is acquired from National records. Sonification techniques of parameter mapping and auditory icons are adopted: sound parameters such as frequencies, amplitudes and timbres are incorporated to represent the crime data, and audio sounds of women screams are employed as auditory icons to emphasize the traumatic experience. Higher crime rates are assigned higher frequencies, harsher scream textures and larger amplitudes. A user-friendly interface is developed with multiple options for sequential and comparative data sonification. Through the interface, a user can evaluate and compare the extent of crime against women in different states, years or crime categories. Sound spatialization is used to immerse the listener in the sound and further intensify the sonification experience. To assess and validate effectiveness, a user study on twenty participants is conducted with feedback obtained through questionnaires. The responses indicate that the participants could comprehend trends in the data easily and found the data sonification experience impactful. Sonification may therefore prove to be a valuable tool for data representation in fields related to social and human studies.