Devlog #20
It has been another quiet week in Loud Numbers land. Miriam’s on holiday, so it’s just Duncan steering the ship.
What’s that? You have no idea who Duncan and Miriam are? Sorry - we’re two data journalists making Loud Numbers, the world’s first data sonification podcast. At some point in the last few months you signed up to our weekly newsletter (the one you’re reading right now), where we talk about how progress is going.
Windscreens
This week, we began working on a new piece looking at extinction. You are probably aware that the Earth is undergoing a mass extinction event right now, but we wanted to tell the story in a way that makes it a bit more personal, a bit more tangible.
Anders Pape Møller is a Danish scientist who’s been driving the same stretch of road every year since 1997. Every time he drives it, he counts the number of bugs that hit the windscreen, and that number has been steadily falling. By 2017, just twenty years after he started collecting data, the number of dead bugs on the windscreen had fallen by 80%.
That’s good news for Møller, who doesn’t have to clean his car windows as often. But it’s bad news for the rest of humanity, because this insect apocalypse threatens the food web that sustains pretty much all life on Earth.
We’re not sure exactly how we’re going to sonify this story yet, but the data’s now all loaded into Sonic Pi (our sonification tool of choice) and ready to go.
Sonification News
Otherwise, we’ve been combing the web for interesting sonification and data/sound work by others. Here’s a quick run-down:
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The Conditional Orchestra, by Richard Bultitude, creates a custom soundtrack based on the weather conditions in your location. There’s a great talk here about how he made it.
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The BBC has released 16,000 sound effects in WAV format, free for personal education or research purposes. If you’re interested in the very literal end of sonification, then you’ll find lots to love here.
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Colombian producer Deraout worked with researchers at GenM to turn part of the cannabis plant’s genome into ambient techno. Here’s a good interview on how they did it (and why).
Seen any good sonification work on the web? We’d love to hear about it. Hit reply and let us know, or send it to us on Twitter.