Devlog #15
It's Friday, and that means it's time for the Loud Numbers devlog - your weekly update on how we (Miriam Quick and Duncan Geere) are building the world's first data sonification podcast.
We've had a bunch of new subscribers lately, so let's quickly run through the basics. We've identified six great stories that we want to tell through the medium of sound and data. That means finding data for the stories, mapping it onto different parameters of sound ( like volume, pitch, and texture), and then writing a script that not only explains the sonification system but also tells the story.
It's a longer, more complex process than we originally anticipated when we started this grand adventure, and we're doing it in our spare time, so we're expecting that it'll be released sometime in early 2021. You'll know when we're getting close because, well, we'll tell you. In this newsletter.
In the meantime, we'll keep you posted with how things are going - what we've been working on each week and what's going on in the wider field of sonification.
Cool Down the Dancefloor
This week we worked on our Recessions track, which will sonify various US economic datasets including the quarters of growth and recessions between 1968 and today.
We already had a skeleton of this together, so our focus this week was turning raw sonification code into something that actually sounds like music. That meant adding drum crashes to mark each year, then bumping up the tempo to 160bpm. That was the point at which we realised that this is gonna be an old skool jungle track. Because capitalism is a PARTY (to which not everyone is invited).
When a recession starts, we play a 'Cool down the dancefloor' vocal sample, the bass starts falling, and the drum loop plays backwards. When the recession ends, an airhorn sounds, the drum loop plays forwards again, and everyone gets back to work. Hurrah!
We want this to be a sample-heavy track, so we spent some time looking for sound clips of politicians and economists making grand pronouncements. No shortage of those. We also chopped in a short vocal sample from The Thick of It, pitched it up into a chipmunk vocal, and added a 'jungle techno' vocal sample in 1993, when jungle techno emerged. Seems right to give our influences a little credit.
In contrast to the UK, US election years are regular as clockwork. So we added a heavy bass drop every four years. We also trimmed a data point off the start, so our dataset starts in Q1 1968 -- giving the track a nice four-square metre. It's turning out to be music first, data second with this one. Which is fine.
Noise Pollution
It's been a great week for other sound/data projects on the web. Karim Douïeb published a fantastic visualization of noise pollution in Brussels, which you can mouseover to hear what different levels of noise pollution actually sound like. It's right at the leftmost edge of the intentionality spectrum we talked about a couple of weeks back.
Nadieh Bremer also published a beautiful set of posters that visualize hit records - not just the sound of the music, but also the process of it becoming a hit. Her design blog on the project is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of data and music.
We're always interested in hearing from people sitting on that intersection and making things for the world. If that's you, then hit reply and say hello and tell us about some of the work you've done, so we can bring it to a wider audience.
Otherwise, we'll be back in your inbox again next Friday. See you then!