Devlog #25
Hello friends. We’re Duncan and Miriam, and this is the super-secret Loud Numbers development log newsletter, where you get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how we’re building the world’s first data sonification podcast. Need an “unsubscribe” link? You’ll find one at the bottom of this (and every) email.
This week, we’ve been refining our insect decline sonification - which has leapt from “the one track we haven’t yet started” to “one of our favourite sonifications that we’ve made for this project” in the space of just a few weeks. How? It’s all down to mood…
Mood Music
Our sonification of insect decline is based on data from this paper. The scientist who wrote it, Anders Pape Møller, drove rental cars along two stretches of road in Denmark almost daily every summer, for two decades. Then he counted the insects killed on his windscreen. He found an 80-97% reduction in their numbers between 1997 and 2017.
In our sonification, the number of unfortunate insects splatted onto Møller’s car each month is mapped to the number of little tremolo sounds in a bar. There’s also a synth pad that follows a descending melodic pattern, based on the measured 1.1% a year decline in global terrestrial insect populations. Every time global insect numbers fall 5%, the melody drops down a pitch. There are only two layers of data mapping in this track, so it’s a simple sonification, by our standards.
We started off with a basic version of the track coded in Sonic Pi, which sounded pretty good already, but a little sterile and digital. We wanted to get across a mood of spaciousness, make the track like the sound of driving through a vast, desolate landscape on a distant highway, with insects hitting your windscreen. (Duncan brought up a visual reference from the game Kentucky Route Zero, which has an amazing soundtrack.) So the music is texturally very sparse, with ambient sound effects – cars zooming past, birds singing.
But the first version we made in Logic was sounding a bit too jazzy and cheerful still. We are sonifying mass extinction, after all. So we dropped the tempo and added a morose, Joy Division-style bassline (see below) and a funereal bell that tolls with each passing data year. The result… well we’re not sure what genre it falls into. It’s got requiem vibes, if requiems can have vibes. Requiem-core?
Dies Irae
Another of the key changes we made to the track was the bassline. The bassline is a big part of the track’s character - endlessly repeating and hypnotic. It’s not tied to any data, but instead serves as a metronome of sorts, sonifying the inexorable passage of time.
Originally we had a bassline that was a loose reinterpretation of the one from Yo La Tengo’s “Night Falls On Hoboken”. In the latest draft, however, we’ve replaced it with a new one that references a different piece of music - one that’s about 800 years older.
Dies Irae (Latin for “The Day of Wrath”) is a short sequence of notes that dates from the 13th century. You’ll undoubtedly recognise it - it’s in work by Mozart and Verdi. It’s referenced in writing by Walter Scott and Oscar Wilde. It’s the four notes that play at the start of The Shining, as the Torrance family drives up to the Overlook Hotel. It’s in Star Wars when Luke returns to the home he grew up in and sees it on fire. It’s the little musical sting that plays every time Kevin encounters Old Man Marley in Home Alone.
It carries strong emotional associations of death and terror - in the same way that including a skull might if used in a visualization. If you want to know more, we highly recommend this fantastic 20khz episode on the subject.
In our case - a requiem for trillions of dead insects - it seemed appropriate to use a slightly modified version of those notes for the bassline. A dark joke for the music nerds that know their Gregorian Chants, and a common emotional touchpoint for everyone else.
That’s all we’ve got for this week. Hit us up with any sonification happenings you’ve seen on the web!