Devlog #22
Hi there!
We're Duncan and Miriam, and this is the super-secret Loud Numbers development log, a weekly newsletter charting our creation of the world's first data sonification podcast. You're getting it because you signed up at loudnumbers.net. If you like it, please encourage others to do the same!
We've spent a chunk of this week doing some promotional work around the show. First, we've been writing up an application to speak at Outlier Online, the inaugural conference of the Data Visualization Society. Second, we've been planning out an article on sonification for Nightingale. Thirdly, we've been figuring out how we're going to get the final tracks mixed and mastered so they sound as great as possible to the listener.
One of those tracks is our sonification of insect declines, built on a dataset collected over two decades in northern Denmark, which we've worked on this week. We aggregated the data by month, taking the average of every sample during that month - which represents the populations of both large insects and small insects.
So far the data/sound mappings are pretty simple. We found a synth that sounds a little like chirruping insects, and play it twice per month - a higher-pitched one for smaller insects, and a lower-pitched one for larger insects. The chirruping is louder when the insect population is higher, and fades out towards the end of the track as population numbers fall.
On top of that, there's a cymbal sound that indicates the passage of each month and a simple, repetitive bassline that isn't currently mapped to any data at all. In the background there's a sample of cars passing by, which lends the whole track an intimate atmosphere.
This first version will likely undergo some major changes. We want to rework the insect sounds so they're a little more randomly distributed, give them some reverb, and probably add a bit more instrumentation - a picked acoustic guitar would fit nicely. There's no acoustic guitar in Sonic Pi, the software we're using, so we'll need to work something up in Logic, but that should be simple enough.
Finally, in parallel, we've started work on our final sonification from this project - on Europe's bureaucracy. More on that next week!