Howdy, sonification fans! This is the super-secret, behind-the-scenes, Loud Numbers newsletter. It’s intended as a little glimpse into what’s involved in the creation of a data sonification podcast, and we’re honoured to be invited into your inbox to share it.

Time Keeps Flowing Like A River

This week we took a long, hard look at our project timeline and rewrote it from scratch to take into account everything we’ve learned so far about making sonifications. Primarily that they take longer than you expect, especially when you’re working on them in your spare time.

Our new goal is to finish first drafts of every sonification and every script by Christmas, then spend the early part of next year recording and polishing it all up until it gleams. Let’s see how that goes.

Clip it Good

We spent a good chunk of this week grabbing samples from various YouTube videos for our sonification of US recessions data.

Most of the clips we grabbed were little snippets from political speeches by various presidents, talking about the state of the economy and what they were doing about it. But for the later time periods (the dataset covers 1968-today) there was a lot more available and we were able to draw from a wider range of sources.

We found two favourite clips. The first is an interview with Tupac from 1992, talking about inequality, greed, and – surprisingly – Donald Trump. It’s only about five minutes long, and it’s brilliant all the way through. Our favourite bit: “I know you’re rich, I know you’ve got 40 billion dollars, but can you just keep it to one house?”

The second is a slightly longer collage piece (9m) recorded for Fidelity Investments in 1994, featuring “ordinary” Americans (and some tourists) talking about money. It’s worth watching for the outfits alone, but our favourite bit is around 2m10s, where a woman is talking about how her goal is to have her own ranch. We really hope her dreams came true 🐄.

Can I Get a Rewind?

We also tried a little experiment this week in our recessions sonification. We’ve been working with an encoding system where the beat plays forwards when the economy is normal and backwards when it’s in recession. Here’s what that sounds like.

The backward sample plays at full speed, however, whereas it feels like you’d want more of a slowdown for a recession. So we tried slowing it down when reversed. This was very easy to do in the code - instead of a speed of -1, it was given a speed of -0.5.

Unfortunately the results weren’t as satisfying as we’d hoped. Halving the speed made it too slow, and an experiment with setting it to 0.75 instead gave the track a weird 3/4 time signature. It totally changed the character of the track, dropping the pace in a way that wasn’t satisfying.

So we changed it back again to how it was originally. Not all experiments work out!

Linking Park

A couple of neat links to finish things off this week.

“Hearing Eugenics” is a 2016 sonification that tells some of the stories of the 20,000 people who were sterilized in California from 1919 to the 1950s. Its creators wrote a great summary of the ethical issues taken into account while making it.

Finally, are you avoiding work? Would you like to spend a fun hour sampling your own voice and playing it back at different speeds? Great. Here’s Chrome Music Lab. See you next week!