ConversionsSoundtoPicture,AnalogtoDigital-cns.ucsb.docVIP

Conversions: Sound and Sight, Military and Civilian Cyrus C.M. Mody Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have long noted scientists’ predilection for converting data into visual representations. Indeed, examining visual representations yielded many early STS keywords. Laboratory ethnographers, for instance, famously reinterpreted scientists as producers of “inscriptions” (Latour 1987). The conversion of Geiger counter “clicks” into “splodges” on a graph offered insights on inferential chains and interactions among sub-fields (Pinch 1985). Conversion-to-the-visual provided a hook to mutually implicate vision and science as hallmarks of modernity (Crary 1990). Visual representations became raw materials for art historical analyses of science (Jones and Galison 1998) and histories of objectivity (Daston and Galison 2007). Visual representations, however, are neither inexorable nor ubiquitous in science. Scientists still work with their ears, finger-tips, and taste buds. Some scientists prefer certain data in audible rather than visual form (Helmreich 2007). Alexandra Supper (this volume) has described the nascent “sonification” community’s struggles for acceptance of this practice. Despite these struggles, sonification has found favor even among scientists whose work is primarily visual. I first ran across sonification, for instance, among scanning probe microscopists (Mody 2005), a group generally committed to visualization (hence microscopy). Yet probe microscopy technology lends itself equally to visual and auditory outputs. The “microscope” is a small solid probe that scans and interacts with a surface; it assembles measurements of the probe-surface interaction into a data array that is usually rendered visually, but sometimes in auditory or other forms. Sonification has been part of probe microscopy since its invention in the 1980s. The technique’s ability to image individual atoms, for instance, was discovered when its inventors heard