Devlog #12

Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the super-secret Loud Numbers newsletter, where you get a glimpse behind the scenes of the creation of the world’s first data sonification podcast. You’re getting this email because you signed up for it at loudnumbers.net, but if that doesn’t sound familiar then there’s a handy unsubscribe button at the bottom of this mail.

With all that out of the way, let’s talk about what we’ve been up to this week.

It’s the economy, stupot

Duncan has been scaffolding out the code for our recessions sonification, which is quite a simple one. We’re looking at the American economy since 1967, and tracking each quarter whether it’s in recession or not - a metric that’s helpfully provided by the Federal Reserve Economic Data archive, or FRED for short.

Alongside the “are we in a recession” data, we’ve got a couple more datasets - one is the Recession Indicator Index, which is the probability that the country is in recession during a particular quarter, and the second is the “leading index” - a compilation of statistics that tend to forecast recessions. If it goes below zero, you can expect a recession soon.

You might wonder why we need these probabilities and predictors of recessions if we have the recession data. The answer is two-fold. On an economic level, these indicators give us a bit more information on whether a recession was expected or not. Then on a sonification level, extra datasets to encode that aren’t just a binary “are we in a recession or not” help fill out the soundscape.

Speaking of the soundscape, we’re not totally sure what this will sound like yet, but we have two touch points in mind. The first is the legendary Amen break which you have definitely heard whether you know it by name or not. We’re gonna play it forwards if the economy is growing, and backwards if it’s in recession.

The second are a collection of samples, led by Democratic strategist James Carville’s famous “It’s the economy, stupid” quip from the 1992 US election. Keeping the focus on the economy helped Clinton (Bill) defeat Bush (George (Sr)). The plan is to collect a series of economy-related samples, playing them at the relevant points in the sonification to give people a sense of time passing.

Missing data

Part of putting the recession sonification together has meant adapting our normalisation function once again - this time to handle missing values (as the leading index data doesn’t begin until 1981). Our new return statement checks to see if there’s data to be normalised (using the ternery operator), and returns a single hyphen if not.

define :normalize do |x, xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax|

  xrange = xmax - xmin

  yrange = ymax - ymin

  return (x == "") ? "-" : ymin + (x.to_f - xmin) * (yrange.to_f / xrange.to_f)

end

The playback code can then check for that hyphen before deciding whether to play or not.

if (l_point != "-")

 play leadscale[l_point], attack: 0, sustain: 0.3, release: 0.5

end

This lets us handle missing data gracefully.

Book it

The only other thing to mention is that Miriam has just released a book! Well, it’s not just a book. It’s also a portal to the universe. And it includes a sonification inside its pages, so you’re probably going to want to get a copy.

If you’re in the UK, you can do that now, and if you’re not then sign up at iamabook.online to find out when you can.

We’ll be back next week with more news about the recessions sonification (we’re seriously tempted to put an air horn in this one) and probably a bit more Brexit.

Until then, stay frosty.