Building a Sonification Community
Hello friends,
We’re Duncan and Miriam, and together we’re Loud Numbers - a data sonification podcast and 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.
Join The Decibels Sonification Community
For a while now it has bothered us that there’s no dedicated place for sonification folks to hang out online - we tend to lurk on the outskirts of data, music and art communities instead. So we’re starting one. It’s called Decibels.
Right now, Decibels is a landing page and a Discord server with about 40-odd members. We’ve just got started, and we’re planning to hold monthly meet-ups and sonification challenges in the new year. Over time, we’re hoping to grow it to encompass a blog or newsletter to surface cool things happening in sonification.
For now though, if you’re someone who experiments with data and sound or you’re just sonification-curious, then we’d love to have you join! It’s free and easy, just head on over to decibels.community and hit “Join the Community”.
If (Only) Data Could Talk…
Back in October, we were invited to deliver a keynote at the Sound of Data conference in Luxembourg about our work, focusing on what sonification can bring to the table when it comes to communicating data to non-specialist audiences. A recording of that talk is now online, and it also features a fantastic panel discussion afterwards with statistician Tom Haas, chemist Emma Schymanski, musician Jamie Perera, and science journalist Lara Schwenner. Go watch!
Loud Numbers Norns Script Update
Duncan updated our Loud Numbers script for the Monome Norns to version 0.16. Here’s a little demo video, and the changelog is as follows:
- This version uses Mark Eats’ lib.Graph library to display a line chart visualization of your data, replacing the previous hand-coded bar chart. It’s more flexible and easy to read - a definite upgrade.
- Support has been added for custom csv separators. Change line 31 (the sep variable) if you’re not using comma-separated values.
- File and column names are now alphabetically ordered in menus, giving more consistency than the random ordering that came before. If you want a particular file or column to load automatically when the script is loaded, add an underscore (_) to the beginning of the file or column name.
Update to the new version of the script through Maiden, like you would any other Norns script. And let us know if you come across any bugs or weirdness!
Waking the Giants
We spent a chunk of the autumn working with Swiss music Simon Petermann turning climate data into a musical piece for trombone and electronics. A few weeks ago, that piece debuted in the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and it was also performed at Sharm el Sheik during the COP27 climate conference.
It was kind of a crazy project - 18 datasets covering every aspect of climate change, from historical CO2, to heatwaves, to glacial melting, to adaptation, and public opinion. The result is wonderful - the haunting trombone pairs perfectly with the pulsing electronics.
You can get a bit of a sense of it from this recording, though unfortunately there are some technical issues with the sound. Hopefully there’ll be a cleaner recording that we can share in the future!
Elsewhere in Sonification
This is a short round-up of sonification news, links, and other stuff that’s caught our eye.
- Berit Kruse and Christian Basl have teamed up to launch a new sonification project called SoniFriday. So far they’ve sonified flooding in 2021 and global temperature change. Follow them on Instagram for more!
- A nice article from Nature about the use of sonification in astronomy.
- Chris Martin has done a nice write-up of his process for putting together a sonification.
- The Guardian has built an (internal-only for now) sonification tool, focusing on getting quick, accessible results. It’s called Noisycharts.
- Bleep Labs just released the “sensory coupler” - a Eurorack module designed for turning sensor data into sound.
- Aaron Taylor-Waldman used 12 instances(!) of the Loud Numbers VCV Rack module to sonify fermentation in a traditional Korean fish sauce.
- A Max for Live device that uses the brightness of an image to shape rhythms.
- Pau Barrina has been using the Loud Numbers Norns script to sonify population decline in rural areas of Spain.
- The Sounds of a Dying Twitter
- Vintage sonification software from 2005.
If you’ve done something cool then let us know about it by hitting reply and we’ll include it in our next issue.
We’ll be back in touch again next year with another update. In the meantime, drop us an email if you have anything you’d like to chat about :)
- Duncan and Miriam