Devlog #11
What's up, data sonification fans? It's Friday, which means it's time for the weekly Loud Numbers development log - a free newsletter that tells the story of how we're making the world's first sonification podcast.
A Yard of Ale
This week, we've been tinkering with the sounds mapped to aroma and taste parameters in our beer sonification. Here's a quick summary of what changed.
- Carbonation: swapped the existing sound for a new sample made in Logic – less slot machine, more glassy bubbles
- Bitterness: swapped out the Roland 303 sound (too evocative of house music) for a new layered synth sound made in Sonic Pi, gnarly and scratchy and staticky with distortion
- Malt: replaced the old synth sound (it was too Delia Derbyshire) with a more organic-sounding fuzzy electric guitar sample
- Ditched the two kick drum beats which were there to represent the sound of swallowing. They were cluttering things up a bit (and weren’t data-driven)
- Changed some of the chord inversions in the sounds that represent aromas and retronasal aromas to create more variety in how the sounds unfold
- Mapped the loudness of the grouped aroma and taste sounds to the aroma and taste scores, which reflect the overall strength of the beer’s aroma or taste as opposed to its individual components like hoppiness or sweetness.
- Mixed the result down on studio monitors. The beers are sounding nice!
Blind tasting
When working on the audio, Miriam labelled each beer in the code using a number from 0 to 10, so we didn’t know which number referred to which beer (like a blind taste test). We didn’t want our prior expectations to influence the sounds we chose too much. Instead, we let the parameter mapping do the work of – hopefully – expressing their different qualities.
There is a good contrast between the beer sounds so it will be interesting to listen to them with the list of beers / an actual beer in hand to see how far the listening experience reflects the drinking one.
Next steps
Next, we plan to interview the cicerone (professional beer taster) who kindly provided us with data, Malin Derwinger, to learn more about each beer from her expert perspective. Then we’ll begin to shape the script for this episode of the podcast.
We'll also work a bit more on the Brexit sonification, which was put on hold while we wrapped up the beer audio. Then it'll be on to our sonification of economic recessions... Plenty to do!