Photo of Niklas Rönnberg

Niklas Rönnberg

Associate Professor, Docent

How can sound be used to simplify the understanding of data, or facilitate a complex interaction? My research is about sound as a complementary modality.

Senior Lecturer in Sound Technology, with research interest in Sonification 

Niklas Rönnberg is a researcher in sonification, the study about sound as a complementary modality in different application areas. He is teaching sound technology, research methodology, electronic publishing, and video production for students at the Media Technology and Engineering and at the Graphic Design and Communication study programs.

Niklas Rönnberg's research in sonification is interdisciplinary and is in the intersection of sound technology, musicology, information visualization, interaction design, and cognitive psychology. Focus is on how deliberately designed and composed musical sounds can be used as complement to visual information in different application areas such as information visualization, process control, and decision support. The research aims to explore how musical sonification can be used, and what elements in the sonification that is most useful, in different application areas.

The research is both theoretical and applied. The theoretical basic research concerns the use of different musical elements in sonification, the mapping between visual information and sonification, and the interaction between sonification and user. The applied research explores research questions such as: how to design sonification for different applications, how to design sounds to create the right user response and experience, as well as if and how auditive and visual information might create a multimodality that is greater than the sum of the two modalities.

Please visit my personal web site

Finger pointing at a nature image on a computer display.

Publications

2023

Marian Weger, Tim Ziemer, Niklas Rönnberg (Editorship) (2023) Sonification for the Masses: Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Auditory Display
Tim Ziemer, Sara Lenzi, Niklas Rönnberg, Thomas Hermann, Roberto Bresin (2023) Introduction to the special issue on design and perception of interactive sonification Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Vol. 17, p. 213-214 Continue to DOI
Tim Ziemer, Sara Lenzi, Niklas Rönnberg, Thomas Hermann, Roberto Bresin (2023) Introduction to the special issue on design and perception of interactive sonification Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces Continue to DOI
Elias Elmquist, Alexander Bock, Jonas Lundberg, Anders Ynnerman, Niklas Rönnberg (2023) SonAir: the design of a sonification of radar data for air traffic control Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Vol. 17, p. 137-149 Continue to DOI
Niklas Rönnberg, Rasmus Ringdahl, Anna Fredriksson (2023) Measurement and sonification of construction site noise and particle pollution data Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, Vol. 12, p. 742-764 Continue to DOI

News

Examples from research

Sonification supports perception of brightness contrast

Watch more of Niklas Rönnbergs' demonstration videos about sonification on Vimeo