NPR did a clever demonstration on Morning Edition this week. To illustrate how much money the 2008 presidential candidates raised last quarter, the announcer played a music clip—one beat of a song for each million dollars. Of course, NPR can't show graphs on radio, but for me, the audio "visualization" was much more visceral than seeing a bar graph. One reason could be the innate drive to want to complete the musical phrase.
I grabbed this chart from another NPR story and created a bar for Brownback by dividing the width of the other bars by the corresponding dollar amounts to get pixels per dollar.
We hear "billions and billions" of statistics on radio and TV, but they rarely come alive unless wrapped in a metaphor. Usually that's an image or a conceptual equivalency, but I think the audio approach bypasses the analytical part of the brain and goes straight to the heart.
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Jochen: Interesting idea, though I think people would have a hard time distinguishing the inner voices in a chord. Perhaps you could use a multitracked band example instead, with drums, bass, guitar, and keys. The NPR example worked for me because most of the bar lengths were so different.
Hmmm, I don't find it all that easy to compare the four "bars" when played sequentially.
How about this alternative: represent every "bar" by a note in a four-note chord, and the duration of each note represents the length of the "bar." In other words, use the graphical chart shown above as a MIDI piano roll. This approach should make it easier to compare all "bars," because it presents them all at the same time, instead of forcing the listener to remember the length of each of the preceding audio clips.