Devlog #2
Hello
My name is Miriam and I’m one half of Loud Numbers with Duncan. Welcome to our second newsletter!
But first, an introduction. For almost a decade I’ve been working with data as a journalist and researcher (here’s my website) but before that I trained as a musicologist. I’ve always been excited to work on projects that bring the worlds of music and data closer together, like Oddityviz, in which the brilliantly talented Valentina D’Efilippo and I visualised David Bowie’s song Space Oddity in ten different ways on the same number of engraved ‘records’. Or Sleep Songs, two pieces of music for choir I wrote based on breathing rate data.
So when Duncan suggested we work on a data sonification podcast together, I jumped at the chance.
So far, the main tool we’ve been using the live music coding synth Sonic Pi, which allows you to write music in Ruby. It’s simple but powerful, the tutorials are witty and engaging, and has a pretty good range of built-in sounds, tending towards the electronic end of the spectrum (everything from Roland TB-303 sounds to Delia Derbyshire-style synth bloops). You can also use it to play external samples. Check it out! It’s free, but you can support it via Patreon.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring some of the capabilities of Sonic Pi has as a sonification tool. So follow along with us as we make mistakes, solve them and – with a bit of luck – learn and improve!
In the meantime, here’s what we’ve been up to this week…
New YouTube channel
Duncan set up a new YouTube account for Loud Numbers.
Here’s what he said:
I read some research a while back that said that some large percentage of younger listeners prefer to listen to podcasts through YouTube rather than traditional podcast apps, so it makes sense for us to be there - even though our content is largely audio-only.
Subscribe, subscribe!
Tweaks for tinny speakers
I spent some time this week tweaking the Loud Numbers theme tune so it sounds better played back through phone speakers with a teeny-tiny dynamic range. Sounds that are too loud (or concentrated in one specific part of the frequency spectrum, like sine waves) can easily max them out. The start of our theme tune is based on a bell sound similar to a sine wave, which was causing a nasty knocking sound.
The solution I found in Logic: drop the volume, add some compression and introduce some complexity to the sound by doubling the tune an octave higher and lower. It seemed to do the trick, and got rid of the knocking. Any other suggestions? Let us know.
Unmute me!
Duncan spent some time making a five-second “unmute me!” video clip that we’ll be able to slap in front of our social media videos in the future.
I grabbed a generic free audio icon from the web and roughed it up with Illustrator’s Filter > Roughen so that it matched the Loud Numbers typeface (Chelsea Market, if you’re curious). Then I made a very simple animation in Adobe Premiere Rush. It’s not fancy, but it should do the job.
Ice, Ice Baby
Our first track will turn ice breakup dates from Nenana, Alaska into icy Scandinavian-style techno. If it ends up sounding anything like this hypnotic banger of a record from Stockholm-based Abdulla Rashim, we'll be seriously pleased.
Duncan wrote a short thread for Twitter and Instagram about it. To save you a click, here’s what he wrote:
People have been trying to guess the exact time the Tanana River ice will break up, at Nenana, Alaska, since 1906. The exact hour and minute of the ice breakup have been logged every year since 1917, and they're getting earlier. In 2019, the ice broke up on 14 April – the earliest on record, and of the ten earliest breakup dates, five are in the last ten years. As well as the ice breakup dates, we're layering on sunspot cycles, temperature data, global CO2 concentrations, seasonal freeze/thaw and some percussion to serve as an axis. We can't wait for you to hear it later in the year!
There are many, many sonifications of global climate change out there – such as this eerie rendition of warming and rising CO2 from Chris Chafe, director of Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
We chose to focus in on the Nenana competition for three main reasons – first because it was new to us and so we suspect it’ll be new to much of our audience. Second because it’s not the usual doom-and-gloom story of climate change, it’s a fun competition! There are prizes! Even if it is like betting which horseman of the apocalypse is fastest.
Finally, the Nenana Ice Classic is a human story, not one that’s purely grounded in numbers. We subscribe to Giorgia Lupi’s data humanism manifesto, and we hope that our work on this podcast can help make math(s) and statistics more accessible to a wider audience. Numbers don’t have to be scary. They just have to be loud.