Reference Sonification

A sonification design pattern in which a fixed, recognisable audio tone represents a known landmark - typically the origin of a coordinate system or another anchor point - and can be re-played on demand so that a user exploring a non-visual data space can re-orient themselves without having to navigate back. In the Kamath et al. (CHI 2026) 3D plot prototype, pressing the 0 key plays a 300 Hz sine tone located at (0,0,0), allowing blind analysts to recover spatial awareness after deep navigation. Reference sonification addresses the loss of 'persistent glance' that sighted users rely on when reading charts.