Devlog #21
Hi there sonification fans. What a weird week, eh? We hope you're all doing okay out there. We've just been keeping our heads down and getting on with things as best as we can.
This, incidentally, is the Loud Numbers development log, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the world's first data sonification podcast by Duncan Geere and Miriam Quick.
A Drive in the Country
As we mentioned last week, we've been working on our next sonification - above the mass extinction of insects. We've got a great dataset from a Danish research who's been tracking the bugs that hit his windshield for 20 years. But what should it sound like?
We're thinking this piece might be more ambient and minimal than some of the others in the first season of the podcast. The data brought up ideas of dusky country roads, with cars swishing past, the hum of the swarm, and the pluck of a guitar string.
To Duncan, this sounds a little like something from the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack, or Yo La Tengo's "Night Falls On Hoboken", an 18-minute epic of a track, with a little gentle vocal at the start which wraps up within five minutes, leaving a gentle beat, meditative bassline, and a squall of atmospheric guitar noise. To Miriam it sounds like Bartók's The Night's Music, with its sparse, minimal textures that sound almost like the chirrups of insects in the twilight.
What music do you imagine when you think about this dataset?
Sonification News
Otherwise, we're continuing to hunt down the best sonification work elsewhere on the web. Here's what we found this week:
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"With the help of an antenna facing south-west, the artists receive signals from a French military radar system, registering objects that enter the Earth's atmosphere. Two musicians perform these data in real time." Live sonification of meteorites
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We've been hunting around for early sonification work, and came across Susumu Ohno's experiments turning genetic data into music in the mid-1980s. Do you know of any earlier sonifications?
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Fireworks as you've never heard them before! A sonification of a video, by Jean-Marc Pelletier.
That's all for this week. We'll be back in seven days, hopefully with a bit more progress on the insects piece.