In the reading, the authors argue that for sonification to be successful it’s necessary that “the listener must believe that the sound produced is, for all intents and purposes, made of the same stuff as the object it is meant to represent”. They bring up the point that the mapping is flexible - a creator must make a decision about how the object will be mapped to sound - but don’t treat it as something big. I think the problem of arbitrary mapping is something that should be considered more seriously. The rules of transformation are as important, if not more important, that the object being transformed. The same object transformed using different rules can produce wildly different sounds. Two different objects transformed using different rules can produce the same sound. If an artist is free to choose any mapping, they are able to produce whatever sound they want from any input object. The “Aesthetics” section of the reading mentions the “Life Music” project that “sonifies DNA sequences by assigning pitches to amino acid sequences”. In order to do this, the authors had to decide which amino acids correspond to which sequences. If they chose a different mapping, the resulting track could have a completely different mood and convey a different message. Of course, “Life Music” is an interesting and thought-provoking project. But does it in any way, artistically or scientifically, represent the underlying DNA data that was used as a source? I don’t believe it does.