Musical versus visual graphs: cross-modal equivalence in perception of time series data.

By applying multidimensional scaling procedures and other quantitative analyses to perceptual dissimilarity judgments, we compared the perceptual structure of visual line graphs depicting simulated time series data with that of auditory displays (musical graphs) presenting the same data. Highly similar and meaningful perceptual structures were demonstrated for both auditory and visual modalities, showing that important data characteristics (function slope, shape, and level) were perceptually salient in either presentation mode. Auditory graphics may be a highly useful alternative to traditional visual graphics for a variety of data presentation applications.