Devlog #45
Hi folks, how's your day going? We're two weeks out from the release of Loud Numbers, which means that things are getting exciting and terrifying in equal measure. It has been a whirlwind of a week and it looks like things will only get busier in the days to come.
This, by the way, is the Loud Numbers Development Log - a weekly newsletter where we (Miriam Quick and Duncan Geere) write about how we're putting together the world's first podcast dedicated entirely to turning data into music. You're receiving it because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe at any time with the link in the footer.
Let's get started.
Lineup
On 5 June 2021, the day that Loud Numbers will be released, we're hosting a sonification festival, collecting some of the foremost experts at turning data into sound and music for a series of talks, interviews and workshops. There's even a sonification gameshow!
Here's the full lineup (turn pictures on in your email client if you can't see it):
Proceedings will kick off at 4pm London time (that's 11am in New York, 8am in LA, 5pm in Berlin, 8.30pm in Mumbai, and 1am in Sydney - sorry Sydney!) and the event will be broadcast live on YouTube. Here's where it'll all go down. We'll send you that link again next week and then the day before the event, but it's probably worth putting the whole thing in your calendar now. Click this link to add it to your Google Calendar.
It'll be recorded so you will be able to watch it later, but we'd strongly recommend being there on the day because there are some fun interactive sessions and live Q&As that you won't want to miss out on.
Editing
We've got the edits pretty much complete on three of our five episodes, and we're working on the last two at the moment. Things have come together nicely - they weren't as much of a pain to edit as we feared, even though some of them are fairly complex - involving lots of voice clips, interviews, sound samples, backing tracks, jingles and the sonifications themselves.
Things to do before launch still include writing press releases for each episode, putting together a press pack and sending it to journalists, figuring out a list of friends and acquaintances that we want to email about the project, uploading all the tracks to the various streaming services and podcast platforms, getting show notes together, and getting the website set up for release.
Deconstructed Anthems
Finally, one of the most impressive things we saw this week was Ikene Ijeoma's "Deconstructed Anthems" (from 2018), which uses mass incarceration data to inform live and automated jazz compositions of the "Star-Spangled Banner". Check it out here. It's the kind of thing that would never get labelled as "sonification" but absolutely is. There's an interview with Ijeoma in Complex Magazine that's well worth a read too.
See you next time when there'll be one week to go! 😬😬😬