STRAUSS: Sonification Tools & Resources for Analysis Using Sound Synthesis

Abstract: Sonification, or conveying data using non-verbal audio, is a relatively niche but growing approach for presenting data across multiple specialist domains including astronomy, climate science, and beyond. The STRAUSS Python package aims to provide such a tool, which builds upon previous approaches to provide a powerful means to explore different ways of expressing data, with fine control over the output audio and its format. STRAUSS is a free, open source (FOSS) package, designed to allow flexible and effective sonification to be integrated into data workflows, in analogy to widely used visualisation packages. The remit of STRAUSS is broad; it is intended to be able to bridge between ad-hoc solutions for sonifying very particular datasets, and highly technical compositional and sound-design tools that are not optimised for sonification, or may have a steep learning curve. The code offers a range of approaches to sonification for a variety of contexts (e.g. science education, science communication, technical data analysis, etc). To this end, STRAUSS is packaged with a number of examples of different sonification approaches, and preset configurations to support "low-barrier, high-ceiling" approach. STRAUSS has been used to produce both educational resources and analysis tools.