Devlog #30

Hi folks! Welcome to the latest Loud Numbers devlog - a weekly newsletter where we keep you posted on our progress in writing, recording and releasing the world’s first data sonification podcast. You’re getting this email because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and of course you can unsubscribe at any time with the link at the bottom.

Outlier Tickets

Have you got your ticket to Outlier Conference yet? You should - it’s next week, and it’ll be the first opportunity to hear one of our finished sonifications. Specifically, you’ll be able to hear Boom & Bust - our sonification of US recessions data in the style of old-skool jungle music. It’s… pretty different from most other sonification work out there! We can’t wait to hear what you think.

The conference looks pretty good otherwise, and tickets are “pay what you can afford”, so head on over and pick one up. We’ll be speaking at 9.10am UTC on Friday 5 February. We know that’s the middle of the night for US folks, but worry not - the video will be published almost immediately after the talk. We’ll link to it in the devlog next week.

The Beat Under The Beers

This week we’ve been working a little more on our sonification of the taste and aroma of ten different beers, which is based on scores compiled by beer expert (a.k.a. “cicerone”) Malin Derwinger. We’ll be interviewing Malin soon for the podcast episode and we’d like her voice to be part of the track, so she says a little about each beer and then you hear the taste of that beer, sonified. We put together a simple, sparse beat we’ll layer behind her spoken word audio. We’ll weave it into an entire track in due course.

Small Sonifications

Dataviz designer Nadieh Bremer released a new piece of work this week on the subject of gravity waves. It’s mostly visual, but if you look closely there are little audifications embedded in the piece which let you hear what the waves might sound like if they were in the range of human hearing.

It’s a small touch, but one that adds so much. First it gives character - the little sound samples are cute, and distinctly different from each other. It also reinforces the message that these waves are ripples in spacetime, just like sound is. But most of all, it makes the piece more accessible to an audience who for all sorts of reasons might prefer to hear the difference between waves over seeing them.

Our sonifications are just sonifications. We made a decision early on, when choosing the podcast format, that they wouldn’t come with visuals attached. But there’s so much potential in using both visualization and sonification techniques in the same piece of work, giving the best of both worlds. Nadieh’s piece is a great demonstration of how effective - and simple! - that can be.

Get a Handel On It

This week we came across Handel, a small procedural programming language for writing songs in the browser, created by Nigerian-American hip hop artist Daye Jack.

It’s in active development, so you might run into some bugs. But it’s already pretty feature-rich. It even includes a P5-style web editor. Try dropping this into it:

start

   chunk loudnumbers

        play C3 for 3b

        play C3 for 3b

        play D3 for 2b

        play E3 for 1b

        play G3 for 2b

        play C4 for 4b

   endchunk

   run loudnumbers with bpm 300

finish

The Github repo is here if you want to contribute or raise an issue.

Starry Starry Night

Finally, this week we happened upon the first example of a paid sonification-as-a-service platform we’ve seen. My Starry Night, which was created by Matt Russo’s System Sounds, lets you create a custom video for someone with music derived from the stars and constellations visible overhead that night.

The FAQ says:

The music is created by converting the color and brightness of the stars into music through a process called sonification. We choose from among the stars and constellations that are visible at each moment and use an algorihm to communicate the color and brightness of the stars through sound. The pitch of the notes is determined by the colour and temperature of the stars. Redder stars, which are cooler, produce lower notes while bluer stars, which are hotter, produce higher notes. The volume of each note is controlled by the brightness of each star with brighter stars producing louder notes. Sonifications such as this can help people who are blind or visually impaired experience the night sky.

Have you seen other paid sonification services out there? Hit reply and share a link with us!