Devlog #29
Hi! We’re Duncan and Miriam, and this is the weekly Loud Numbers Devlog - a super secret email where we tell you about how we’re building the world’s first data sonification podcast. You’re getting this email because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe at the bottom if you need a break.
The Art of Mastering
We were excited to get hold of mastered versions of two of our finished sonifications this week.
Mastering is the art of making a musical track sound as good as it can on as many playback devices as possible, from a high-end club sound system to your mobile phone speakers. It’s a specialised job done by mastering engineers that involves adjusting the levels and fine-tuning things like equalization and compression until everything sounds just 👌. Mastering is essential to making a track sound professional, which is why we’re having our music mastered for this podcast.
Tara and Baly at Queer Ear Mastering in Berlin did an incredible job, giving our tracks a clarity, sheen and polish that we never could have achieved alone. We’re super happy with the results!
Outlier schedule is live
The Outlier 2021 conference schedule has been unveiled. We’ll be speaking about Loud Numbers at 09:10am GMT on Friday 5 February. It’ll be a recorded talk with a live Q&A and we’ll be playing an (almost) world exclusive of one of our sonifications! Get your tickets here - it’ll be the first time you’ll be able to hear one of our finished tracks.
Otherwise, it’s been a quiet week for us, but here’s some cool stuff we came across online…
Man with Venn
We love Venn 7 by Nathan Ho, which sonifies a series of seven-way Venn diagrams using musical pitches that combine at the intersections to form lush harmonies. Nathan even put the source code on Github.
It’s only January, granted, but Miriam thinks this is the coolest thing she has seen on the internet so far this year.
Space bass
From SpaceWeather.com:
High above the Arctic Circle in Lofoten, Norway, citizen scientist Rob Stammes operates a space weather monitoring station. His sensors detect ground currents, auroras, radio bursts, and disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field.
This week, he says, “I received a musical note from the magnetosphere.”
“Around 05.30 UTC on Jan. 18th, our local magnetic field began to swing back and forth in a rhythmic pattern,” he says. “Electrical currents in the ground did the same thing. It was a nearly pure sine wave—like a low frequency musical note. The episode lasted for more than 2 hours.”
We’d really like to hear an audification of this data!
Got anything else we should see, or do you just want to get something off your chest? Hit reply. We read everything (and usually reply to everything too).