Devlog #36
Hello folks. Welcome to the 36th Loud Numbers development log - a weekly newsletter that gives you a peek behind the scenes at how we’re building the world’s first podcast consisting entirely of data sonifications. As always, you’re receiving this message because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe any time with the link in the footer.
This week has been mostly admin and polishing up the beer sonification to full completeness (we’ve also both been pretty busy with client work - we’re full-time freelancers, making this podcast in our spare time!). But there are a few things to talk about today.
The article we wrote in January for DataJournalism.com about the opportunities for sonification in journalism has been published. It’s called “Making Numbers Louder”. See what we did there? Here’s a little snippet of the intro:
For years now, the gap between traditional reporting and data journalism has been shrinking. Today, statistics and figures are a common sight in reporting on almost any issue – from local politics, to health, to crime, to education, to arts and culture.
But over-reliance on data can sometimes lead reporters to neglect the human angle of their stories. Without a direct link to people’s lived experiences, a story will feel flat and characterless. This is most often solved by bringing in photography, video or perhaps an interview. But over the past year, we’ve been exploring another approach…
You can read the full article at DataJournalism.com.
We’re narrowing down a release date for the podcast. It’s looking like it’s going to be the end of May or start of June. So that’s exciting. We’ll put out an episode every two weeks from that point onwards, accompanied by the track from the episode released as a single on streaming services.
To celebrate the podcast’s release, we were thinking that it might be fun to gather the sonification community together for a small, virtual, data sonification festival/unconference - with some talks, some panels, and maybe even some live sonification performances. Tickets will be free, and it’ll likely be held in the afternoon/early evening European time, so that as many folks from around the world as possible can attend.
If you’d be interested in speaking or performing, hit reply to this email and tell us what you’d like to talk about or perform. It would be for a general audience, but hopefully one which is already familiar with the subject, so we can get a bit deeper than “here’s what sonification is”. Maybe share what you learnt from a recent sonification project, talk about some interesting research on the subject, or give a live rendition of a sonification piece. Unfortunately there’s no budget to pay anyone (least of all us), so don’t go crazy, but hopefully it’ll be a bit of fun for everyone, and a chance to meet other folks working on sonification.
Finally, we’re thinking about dropping one of our planned episodes. Specifically, the “news music” episode about Brexit. There are a few reasons why. First, it’s the episode that’s the least “finished”. It would need quite a lot of work to finish off, and we’d rather spend that time on making the other episodes perfect.
Second, when we started working on the podcast, Brexit was still a hot topic, but now that everyone’s 48% of the population’s worst fears have been realised it’s a little less interesting, and a little more painful. Simply put, the story just isn’t as compelling as it was.
Third, the coolest thing about that sonification is the “geiger counter” element and the news music genre, not the story itself. We can easily re-use those elements for another newsy subject in a potential season two of the podcast, if we get that far (and if not, we’ll release the work to the community).
We’ve not made a final decision on this yet - if the other tracks come together quickly, and we have some time, then we’ll see if we can find a more compelling story to tell and get something together. But it’s looking unlikely, and we felt like it was only fair to share what we’re thinking.
Let’s finish off for today with some cool sonification stuff that we’ve spotted on the web recently:
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Sound designer and researcher Sara Lenzi will be talking about the design of data sonification at the S-H-O-W conference on 8 and 9 April.
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Jamie Whyte reworked his haunting Covid-19 sonification to cover many more countries.
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Sonification of subway wall designs (thanks Preston!)
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Powerchord: experiments in energy sonification, by Dan Lockton.
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Do the speech melodies of Leoš Janáček count as sonification? (thanks Filip!)
Seen something great? Send it to us (hit reply to this email) and we’ll share it with the community. That’s a Loud Numbers promise.
Catch you next week!
- Duncan & Miriam