Devlog #38
We have a release date! Mark your calendars for 5 June 2021, when we'll be releasing the first episode of Loud Numbers - "The Natural Lottery". It's a Saturday, and we'll be celebrating that day with a small sonification festival of talks and performances from across the community. More on that in due course.
After that, we'll be releasing new episodes every other week on Mondays. So the second episode will come out on 21 June, then the third on 5 July, the fourth on 19 July and the fifth and final episode on 2 August. Are you excited? We're excited.
Oh, but where are our manners? Welcome to the Loud Numbers development log, a weekly newsletter where we (Duncan and Miriam) talk about how we're building (finishing!) our data sonification podcast. You're receiving it because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe at any time with the link in the footer.
This week, as well as announcing the release date, we've been doing a little bit of prep work for the launch festival, starting to rework The Natural Lottery, working on the website (you'll see we added an FAQ), and celebrated the fact that our article for datajournalism.com got picked up on journalism.co.uk. In fact it's their "tip of the day".
Our talk at the Outlier Conference is now public! If you didn't attend, you can finally watch us talk about what we've learnt over the last year about telling stories with data and music. You can also get a preview of one of the episodes of the podcast - Boom & Bust. It's only 25 minutes long, so give it a watch.
We promised to share an episode cover each week, so here's the next one - Tasting Notes! We played around with trying to do fizzy triangle bubbles in beer, but in the end decided that a simple tongue worked best.
What else has been going on in the world of sonification? Well:
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We put together a Twitter thread of nice examples of "eye music" - weirdly shaped musical staves/notation. 14th Century French composer Baude Cordier did a lot of these.
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Björk has been creating generative soundscapes with Microsoft and the Sister City hotel in New York. The music apparently responds to things happening in the sky above the hotel, which seems to make it sonification?
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Chris Ried from Generate Collective interviewed musician Dave Yarwood, touching on how you can integrate data into generative music. It's pretty long, but the bit on sonification starts at 24m20s or so.
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Finally, we were honoured to be included in Gavin Freeguard's list of newsletters, events and podcasts related to data. If you want more data-oriented stuff in your life, here's a big ol' list of things to subscribe to.
That's all for this week. Have a wonderful weekend, and we'll be back in your inbox next Friday!