Is Sonification Doomed to Fail?

Despite persistent research and design efforts over the last twenty years, widespread adoption of sonification to display complex data has largely failed to materialize, and many of the challenges to successful sonification identified in the past persist. Major impediments to the widespread adoption sonification include fundamental perceptual differences between vision and audition, large individual differences in auditory perception, musical biases of sonification researchers, and the interdisciplinary nature of sonification research and design. The historical and often indiscriminate mingling of art and science in sonification design may be a root cause of some of these challenges. Future sonification design efforts that explicitly strive to meet either artistic or scientific goals may lead to greater clarity and success in the field and more widespread adoption of useful sonification techniques.