Sonification for Everyone Everywhere - Evaluating the WebAudioXML Sonification Toolkit for Browsers

Creating an effective sonification is a challenging task that requires skills and knowledge on an expertise level in several disciplines. This study contributes with WebAudioXML Sonification Toolkit (WAST) that aims at reaching new groups who have not yet considered themselves to be part of the ICAD community. We have designed, built, and evaluated the toolkit by analysing ten student projects using it and conclude that WAST did meet our expectations and that it lead to students taking a deep approach to learning and successfully contributed to reaching the learning outcomes. The result indicates that WAST is both easy-to-use, highly accessible, extensively flexible and offers possibilities to share the sonification in any device’s web browser simply through a web link, and without installations. We also suggest that a sonification toolkit would become an even more creative environment with virtual instruments and mixing features typically found in Digital Audio Workstations.