The sounds allow users to monitor and react to what is happening in much the same way that, for example, the driver of a manual-shift car changes gear in response to the sound of the engine. Just as a driver pays attention to the engine's sound only if it changes dramatically, a user of an application written with Sonnet would react only if unexpected sounds occurred. Jameson sees an obvious use for sonification in desktop computers. You could easily use audio to inform you of diverse events, such as the arrival of important email or a change in a stock price. In the latter, Sonnet can enable investors to literally play the stock market, using a Sonnet block that receives price quotes and transmits them to other blocks to process and convert into sound.
Sonnet also has important applications in computer science.
Because it must react to events in real time with sophisticated scheduling algorithms, Sonnet can provide a test bed to explore better ways to build real-time systems addressing such critical issues as timing, parallelism and distributed applications. Katherine Silberger is a freelance writer based in New York City. Superior Sound Watson's Computer Music Center is not alone in IBM in helping computers to make music. FM synthesis is the conventional method for synthesizing music through computer sound systems. To play a specific instrument, the technique reproduces the requested notes of the different instruments by referring to a table that specifies how certain sound features should be produced for each instrument.