Devlog #18
Howdy, it's Miriam and Duncan and you're reading the Loud Numbers development log: giving you a peek behind the scenes of the world's first data sonification podcast.
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Right, here's what we've been up to this week.
Trump's unusual talent
We finished exporting lots of audio samples from YouTube, edited them and placed them throughout our sonification of US recession data to create a spoken-word narrative that will play over the top of the track.
We've got samples of political speeches by US presidents - Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama and, inevitably, Trump. We've also got quotes from various economists, traders, commentators and people in the street. One of the samples simply says 'Reaganomics' -- that heady combination of tax cuts, decreased social spending, increased military spending and market deregulation that characterised US economic policy in the 1980s. We could be wrong, but we're pretty sure the word 'Reaganomics' has never been sampled in a jungle track before.
Our sonification covers the period from 1968-2019, so it's a sweep through 50 years of US economic history in five minutes. Samples from the 1970s play during the 1970s part of the track, 1980s in the 1980s, and so on, creating a kind of blurry timeline -- you know which decade you're in, based on which president is speaking.
One odd thing we learned: Trump has a surprisingly musical speaking voice that sounds good when chopped up and sampled. Maybe he should start making TikTok chorus videos and, um, quit the day job...
It's Friday!
So why not waste some time playing on Chrome Music Lab. It has drumming monkeys, oscillators with faces and a spectrogram you can sing into.
You want more? How about a digital version of the classic Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and TR-808 drum machine? You're welcome. An illustrious lineup of people were involved in its development including legendary DJ A Guy Called Gerald and artist Yuri Suzuki, creator of Acid Brexit, an acid-house inspired Brexit protest album stuffed full of Theresa May samples (caution: NSFW). It's very much cut from the same cloth as our recessions sonification, so it'd be churlish of us not to mention it.
That's it for this week. We're always interested in hearing from other people working at the intersection of data and sound. If that's you, then hit reply, say hi, and tell us about the work you've done, so we can bring it to a wider audience.
See you next week!