PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper presents a new interactive sonification technique to browse ribonucleic acid secondary structures using a combined auditory and visual interface. Despite the existence of several optimization criteria for searching an optimal structure within the numerous possible structures of an RNA sequence, it is still necessary to manually inspect a huge number of the resulting structures in detail. We describe briefly the background of RNA structure representation and typical search scenarios. Then we discuss the audio-visual browser in detail, with a special focus on the sound design, data-to-sound mapping and interactive aspects. The sonifications we propose turn RNA structures into auditory timbre gestalts according to the shape classes they belong to. Various research-relevant phenomena become clearly audible such as transitions among shape classes and different free energies of selected folds. Both can be simultaneously assessed in an interface that allows for an integrated audio-visual perception.