Devlog #34
Hi folks, and welcome to the latest Loud Numbers development log. You’re getting this newsletter because you signed up for it on our website at some point in the distant past. You can unsubscribe at any time.
This week, we gave our Outlier talk again at the Dataviz Stockholm meet-up. It was a nice crowd, and we got some great questions. Now that we’ve done a few of these, we could probably put together an FAQ of some sort, covering the basics of sonification, the tools that we use, our process, and accessibility. If there’s a question you’d like to see covered, then hit reply and we’ll make sure to include it.
We’ve also been thinking about how we’re going to rework our super-basic landing page to hold the final podcast when it’s ready for release. There are zillions of options, but we’re quite tempted to just go super basic and code it all in a single column of HTML and CSS, with an embedded player from our podcast host. That would be nice and simple, wouldn’t it?
Finally, we’ve been further refining our “Tasting Notes” sonification, chopping the best bits out of the interview we did with cicerone Malin Derwinger and positioning them alongside the individual beer sonifications to make a single track.
It’s coming together nicely. But there are still a lot of moving parts, like how much speech there should be between each beer, whether that needs to be consistent or whether it can vary, and how we add a bit of large-scale structure so it sounds like a single piece of music - rather than a bunch of little beer jingles.
One challenge is that the current version of the track is more than 10 minutes long, which feels a bit long possibly? So we’re thinking about ways in which we can cut that down a little. Or maybe we just relax into it with a beer in hand. Let’s see.
In wider sonification-ish news this week, we loved:
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Ezekiel Aquino’s “generative impromptu undulations in C”.
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Tim Dowling’s Guardian article on the restorative value of natural soundscapes.
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Related: Tree.fm lets you tune into the sound of forests from around the world.
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Sound-sensitive typography for the SF Symphony.
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Samuel Van Ransbeeck’s database of sonification works.
Finally, if you’ve got 15 minutes to donate to the cause of improving astronomical sonifications, then fill in this survey from Dr Kimberly Arcand from Harvard University. You get to hear three different data sonifications of objects in our Universe, and then you need to respond to some questions about these pieces.
That’s all for this week - catch you next Friday!