On-device Internet of Sounds Sonification with Wavetable Synthesis Techniques for Soil Moisture Monitoring in Water Scarcity Contexts

Abstract

Sonification, the mapping of data to sound to communicate information about the original data source, is becoming a viable strategy for the sonic representation and communication of information derived from the complex flows of data exchanged across Internet of Sounds (IoS) networks. This paper presents an IoS sonification implementation for monitoring soil moisture levels within the broader context of the globally increasing water scarcity. While previous work has focused on sonifications operating on the applications and services level of the IoS network infrastructure, this paper explores device-level sonification using wavetable synthesis techniques to map sensor data to acoustic parameters. An approach to on-device wavetable sonification is formalized, and a prototype implementation is presented and explored before the approach is contextualised with regard to the soil moisture monitoring tasks.