Devlog #44
Hello hello! Welcome to the Loud Numbers development log newsletter - a super-secret behind-the-scenes look at how we’re putting together our upcoming podcast. Which is extremely upcoming now - we’ll be releasing the first episode on 5 June! As always, you’re getting this message because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe at any time with the link in the footer.
Editing
Phew, what a week it’s been. After recording all the episodes of the podcast last Thursday and Friday, we’ve spent this week kicking them into shape. We used Zencastr to record, which delivers wonderful sound quality despite the two of us being located in entirely different countries. We processed those recordings with Descript, which is fantastic for editing speech. Then finally we used Logic Pro to sequence the speech, the audio examples from each track, and then the tracks themselves.
We’ve completed first passes on the first three episodes, which need a bit of tweaking still but aren’t far off. The last two episodes are still on the to-do list. Everything is sounding great, which is a relief because neither of us have really done any podcast editing work in the past. We could have paid someone to do it for us, I suppose, but why not take the opportunity to learn a new skill instead?
Speaking
We’ve also started announcing speakers for the Loud Numbers Sonification Festival on 5 June! From 4pm London time we’ll be broadcasting a free, live, event on YouTube.
In many ways, this is our launch party — but it’s more than just that. We also wanted to take the opportunity to collect together the sonification community to talk about the artform and share what we’ve found to be effective and not so effective.
We’re been announcing speakers on a daily basis this week in a Twitter thread. Here they are all collected together:
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Kicking things off will be Alex Selby-Boothroyd, head of data journalism at The Economist! He’ll be talking about how he’s brought sonification work into the Economist’s podcasts. We’re super excited to hear from him about what sonification can bring to journalism.
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The second speaker at our sonification festival on 5 June will be Richard Bultitude! He’ll be talking about The Conditional Orchestra - which generates beautiful ambient music based on weather data in your (or any other) location 🌦
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Our third speaker on 5 June will be Sara Lenzi - who we’ll be interviewing about the Data Sonification Archive, her use of sonification techniques in art, and the latest academic sonification research.
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Our fourth speaker, just before the break, will be none other than Jordan Wirfs-Brock! She’ll be hosting a session on developing everyday recipes for Interacting with Data + Sound, where she’ll co-create sonifications with the audience in real-time! You won’t want to miss it.
We’ll announce four more names next week. Keep your eyes on Twitter for that, or just open next week’s email where we’ll collect them all together for you. We’ll send out the link to watch the event in due course.
Administrating
Because this whole endeavour isn’t complicated enough already, as well as publishing a podcast we’re also publishing a collection of songs at the same time. Each Loud Numbers track will be available to listen to independently of the podcast itself in music streaming services, which adds an extra layer of administrative complexity.
We spent a bit of time this week getting registered as an artist on Spotify (and other music streaming platforms), getting our profile in order, and submitting the first track that’ll be released to various playlists.
That’s where you come in - if you’re a Spotify user, could you do us a solid and click over to our artist page and then click “follow”? Followers are one of the metrics that Spotify uses to decide whether to feature tracks on one of its many magical playlists, so it’ll boost our chances enormously. It’ll also mean that you get all the songs on your “Release Radar” playlist as they’re released.
Okay, that’ll do from us for this week. A few things from the rest of the web:
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Jordan Wirfs-Brock published a data-inspired musical collaboration with Bishop Sand, which reflects the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. More details in this Twitter thread.
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Listen to the sound of the upper atmosphere of Venus - the radio emissions recorded by Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe as it breezed by the planet in July 2020.
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Trud Antzée spotted a beautiful graphic score for “Music for Electric Metronome” by Toshi Ichiyanagi.
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An endless, generative, acid banger by Vitling.
As ever, you can hit reply to this email to ask us anything you want, tell us what sonification goodies you’ve been working on, or just shoot the breeze. We love hearing from you.
xox
- Miriam & Duncan