Devlog #24
Hello, Miriam here – one half of Loud Numbers, with Duncan Geere. Loud Numbers, if you hadn’t heard, is the world’s first data sonification podcast! You’re receiving this week’s devlog because, well, you probably signed up to it at some point at loudnumbers.net. If you didn’t, just hit ‘Unsubscribe’ at the bottom of this email.
So, what have we been up to this week?
Ode to the EU
As the UK nears the end of its Brexit transition period 😬 😖 😱, I have been writing a piece of music all about the laws made by the European Union.
Starting in 1952, the number of new laws the EU publishes each year rose steeply until the late 1980s. Then it began to tail off, and it has dropped precipitously in recent years.
Why this rise-fall pattern? We’re not sure, but it’s interesting how the EU reached peak bureaucracy just as liberalism was, arguably, reaching its peak with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘end of history’ (now postponed).
Duncan scraped the underlying data from the EUR-Lex database, which tags each law with keywords. These reveal how the EU’s priorities have shifted over the years: 1950s laws were mainly about tax and coal; more recently, the focus of EU legislators has shifted to aid, health and fish.
We considered including a breakdown of laws by keyword in our sonification, but in the end we decided to use only the overall number of laws. The arc-shaped to the trend lends itself nicely to musical forms, so I’ve been experimenting with writing a piece of baroque-style counterpoint in which the number of parts corresponds to the number of laws over time. (In bins, that is, giving up to eight different melodic voices at once; 5,000 parts might have been a step too far.)
Why baroque-style counterpoint? Well, because it’s thickly woven, fussy, and somewhat formal – but brilliant all the same. Like the EU. I’m using a particular form of counterpoint called a fugue. Fugues are based around an initial melody that keeps coming back in different guises – different parts, different keys, played upside-down. In a fugue, everything is melody and all the parts are equal, none more important than the other. Just as in the EU, all citizens and nations are equal (in theory at least), none more important than the other.
And the melody for this fugue? Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, from the Ninth Symphony. It’s the official anthem of the European Union (and on the soundtrack to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange). I’ll come clean here: I don’t like this tune very much, so writing a whole fugue based on it is a challenge. But it feels totally right for this project. Can our version smooth out its bombastic, militaristic edges, rid it of its sheen of ultraviolence? Or does it even need to? Let’s see.
Library Takeout
Otherwise, we’ve been raving to this incredible instructional video that tells you how to take out a book from Duke University Libraries. Trust us, this is no ordinary library instructional video song. It was written by librarian Jamie Keesecker, who has a PhD in music composition. We love it!
That’s all for now. See you next week!