Devlog #43
Hello sonifriends! Welcome to the Loud Numbers Devlog - a weekly newsletter charting our progress towards creating the world’s first podcast dedicated solely to turning data into music. As always, you’re getting this email because you signed up for it on our website, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Countdown to the Countdown
Loud Numbers will be released on 5 June 2021, which gives us… checks calendar… 29 days to finish it. That’s just 20 workdays, and most of those we need to spend on client work, so there’s basically like a week or something to go. Scary.
But! We spent all of yesterday recording the actual episodes themselves - introducing each story, and then explaining how the sonifications work. We also did a first pass, removing all the fluffs - like Duncan’s mangled Swedish-English attempts at pronouncing the Danish town of Kraghade, and when Miriam found it impossible to say the word “bureaucracy”. There was also a moment where we both inexplicably lapsed into a Geordie accent.
In terms of production work, all that’s left to do is edit the episodes together (a job that we’re kicking off today), and finish off the arrangement of the fugue that we’re using to sonify the European Union’s database of laws.
Talking Heads
We’ve also got a big pile of things to do to make sure that people actually listen to the podcast when it’s released. The biggest thing on that list is the Loud Numbers Sonification Festival on 5 June, which will bring together some of the most interesting people in sonification for a series of talks and interviews.
The event will be totally free to attend, and broadcast live on YouTube. We’ll send a link to this list the day before, but for now it’s probably a good idea to put it in your diary - we’ll be starting at 4pm London time on 5 June, which is 5pm in Berlin, 11am in New York, and 8am in LA.
We’ll put some recordings up afterwards for those who’ll be asleep, but you’re definitely going to want to tune in live if you can, because we’ve got lots of interactive events planned - including a full-scale sonification gameshow.
Throughout next week we’ll start announcing some of the speakers on our Twitter account, and we’ll also include a full list in next week’s devlog, so stay tuned for that.
Finally, there’s a bunch of press work to do - building up a small list of journalists to email, and actually emailing them. We’d love to do interviews about the project, and now is a great time to ask us because our availability after the first episode is released will be more limited.
So if you’d like us to appear on your podcast, or to do an interview for your website, hit reply to this email and we’ll slot it in.
Normally we put a bunch of other sonification stuff on the web here, but we’ve been pretty heads-down this week so we’ve not seen much! If you’ve spotted something cool then send us a link and we’ll include it next time.
Until then, with bleeps and bloops
- Duncan & Miriam