Feeling Loki's Pain: Designing and Evaluating a DIY 3D Auditory Display for Geodata Sonification

Loki’s Pain is an immersive 3D audio installation artwork, a sonification of seismic activity. Visitors take the place of Loki, who was punished by the gods and caused earthquakes. We designed an auditory display in the shape of a hemi-dodecahedron and built a prototype with a low-budget, DIY approach. Seismic data were retrieved from the Internet. Location, magnitude, and epicentre depth of hundreds of recent earthquakes were sonified with physical modelling synthesis into a 10-minute piece. The visitor experience was evaluated in a listening experiment (N = 7), comparing the installation with a version for headphones. Differences on eight semantic scales were small. A content analysis of focus group discussions nuanced the investigated topics, and qualitative interpretation strengthened the quantitative findings. Verbal expressions of immersivity were stronger in the installation, which stimulated longer and more detailed responses. Aspects such as audio quality, the structure's physical-visual shape, and multisensorial design evoked both positive and negative emotions, and elicited imagination and memory recall. However, the assumed capacity of the LOKI structure to stimulate a richer social experience than that of headphone listening was not supported by the responses in this study.