ABSTRACT
The matter of listening and aesthetics is a tension at the heart of sonification. This chapter proposes that adopting an ecological approach based upon Eric Clarke's use of the subject-position in musical listening can provide the language and tools necessary for this. In pursuit of an aesthetics of sonification, the chapter discusses how Clarke's ecological account may be usefully adapted to overcome these hindrances. Sonification may be heard as music, but it is not intended to produce music as an outcome; the intended outcome of sonification is knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. A sonification can be described as an external representation of data or information, for example, communicating the state of a computer network to a network administrator. A sonification aesthetic is not a Western concert music aesthetic. It is an experiential, ecological or perception-action aesthetic.
