Devlog #41
Hi there! Welcome to the Loud Numbers devlog - a short weekly newsletter charting our progress in building the world's first podcast turning data into music.
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The Final Countdown
We've got about six weeks to go now until the first episode of Loud Numbers is released, and there's so much still to do. We need to finish off our final sonification (A Symphony of Bureaucracy), record our intros to each episode, prepare sound effects, edit that all together, and get it all uploaded to our podcast host. That's just to make sure the podcast comes out.
Then there's all the stuff we need to do to make sure people actually listen to it - updating our website, putting together lists of people to email about it, writing a press release and figuring out who to send it to, organising our launch festival, writing something for the launch, and keeping up the usual social media and newsletter output.
If we go a bit quiet, especially in the last few weeks, that's why!
This week
Over the past seven days we spent a chunk of time writing and finessing the final outstanding script. The script, for A Symphony of Bureaucracy, serves as a whistlestop tour of the history of the European Union, an introduction to the features of a classical fugue, and explains how we've mapped data from one to the other. The first draft was pretty solid, so there wasn't much editing work necessary.
Other than that, we've updated the Loud Numbers homepage to include the trailer (listen here if you've not heard it), spent a little time doing some t-shirt promo on social media ,and recorded an interview with another podcast - which we're very excited about but can't talk about for a few more weeks. You'll hear more on that in due course.
T-shirts
Last week we put a bunch of t-shirts on sale, with various nerdy slogans. A surprising number of you bought one, so that was nice! We earn a whopping £2.70 per t-shirt sold, so no need to go wild, but if you do want to broadcast your love of sonification then here's where to get one. All designs are available in all colours, in both mens' and womens' sizes.
Elsewhere on the web
It's been a relatively quiet week for sonification work elsewhere on the web, but we did spy the following:
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German social scientist Joachim Allhoff has put together some sonifications of social changes over time.
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Nasa Goddard published some sonifications of black holes on its Instagram.
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Markus Buehler and his team sonified spiderwebs(!).
That's all we've got for you today. Ping us a message if you've seen any good sonification work on the web.
Oh, and if you've mailed us about speaking at the launch event and not had a reply yet then sit tight - we'll be getting back to everyone at the start of May.
Catch you next week!
- Duncan & Miriam