Bristol Burning, Punk Sonification & Academic Citations
Hello friends,
We’re Duncan and Miriam, and together we’re Loud Numbers - a data sonification studio. You’re getting this email because you signed up for our newsletter, and you can unsubscribe at any time with the link in the footer.
Bristol Burning
What if you could hear how polluted the air is? Our latest Loud Numbers commission, Bristol Burning, explores that question by transforming a year of city air into sound. Watch the video or listen on Soundcloud.
There are two layers to the track - one purely musical, one data-driven. The musical layer is a dub-influenced track that features vocals by Bristol artist T. Relly and samples of local community members.
Played at the same time is the data-driven layer, a dirty drone noise that sonifies levels of dangerous particulate (PM10) air pollution people in Bristol had to breathe from August 2021 to July 2022. It’s based on air quality sensor data from Open Data Bristol. We mapped the volume and filter cutoff of the drone to the monthly average particulate levels so that the worse the air quality, the louder and harsher it sounds.
The sonification begins in summer. Air quality tends to get worse in winter for all sorts of reasons (cold air sinking, increased traffic, woodburners), so the drone starts unobtrusively but gets pretty wild in the middle of the track. In spring – the end of the track – the air cleans up and the drone fades out, letting you hear the music clearly once again.
We love the video, directed by Rosana Warshawski and Esme Warren and featuring vocalist T. Relly, aerial drone footage of Bristol, dancers and community members from the St. Paul’s district of the city, tons of woodburner smoke and some insane glitching.
Bristol Burning was commissioned by Knowle West Media Centre as part of the Slow the Smoke citizen science project. The UK’s Channel 4 News featured the track in a report about diesel vehicle pollution recently, alongside interviews with T. Relly and some local schoolchildren. Watch the clip here.
Read more about how the track was created in Miriam’s KWMC artist blog.
Punk Sonification Workshop
We’re doing another sonification workshop, and this time it’s online! The title is “Punk Sonification: A DIY Approach to Turning Data into Sound”.
It’s about making sonifications without code or synthesizers or even spreadsheets.
It’s about the strong emotional connection humans have with sound and music.
It’s about expressing yourself freely with data and sound.
It’s gonna be heaps of fun.
It’s on 17 April. Sign up here.
VCV Rack Workshop
More workshops? Yep! On 2 April (in a couple of days), Duncan will be running a short workshop for members of our Decibels Sonification Community on modular synthesis and how to create sonifications with the free VCV Rack virtual modular synth, and the Loud Numbers module for VCV Rack. Bring some CSVs and let’s make some weird music together. Sign up here.
Why Sonification Works
Here’s a short video rounding up a collection of interviews on the challenges of communicating data to a general audience, and the opportunities that sonification affords us - starring us, as well as a collection of other smart folks. Our bit starts at 0m45s or so.
Data Mapper Upgraded
We just fixed a small bug on our categorical data mapper tool. Give it a CSV file and an ordered list of things (e.g. musical notes, colours, or just “low, medium, high”) and it’ll automatically classify them for you. Useful for punk sonifications!
Academic Papers
Loud Numbers was featured in this new scientific paper from PerMagnus Lindborg, Sara Lenzi and Manni Chen, analysing 32 recent sonifications and visualizations of climate data. Here’s what they wrote:
Geere and Quick have specialized in making “sonification podcasts” for their series Loud Numbers. Each program typically starts with a pedagogic explanation of the design strategy, which effortlessly translates into listening tips (i.e., providing a legend for how the listener can extract meaning from the sounds). In “The End of the Road”, they built on Pape Møller’s laboriously collected time series data on insect population density on a rural road in Denmark, and more recently, they turned data from traditional ice measurements in a village in Alaska into techno music.
We’re also featured a bit in Jordan Wirfs-Brock’s PhD thesis, titled “Beyond the Bleeps & Bloops: Narrative, Multi-Sensory, and Social Approaches to Communicating Data with Sound”. Add it to your reading list!
Elsewhere in Sonification
This is a short round-up of sonification news, links, and other stuff that’s caught our eye.
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India in Pixels takes a “Two Trains” approach to sonifying per-capita income from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
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If the Mathematical Constant Pi Was a Song, What Would It Sound Like?
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As a pianist strikes a chord, visualisations of his notes appear in real time
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Loving this TikTok of “singing charts”.
If you’ve done something cool then let us know about it by hitting reply and we’ll include it in our next issue.
That’s it for today! We’ll be back in touch again in probably about a month with a VERY EXCITING update. In the meantime, drop us an email if you have anything you’d like to chat about!
- Duncan and Miriam