Devlog #46
Hello hello! Welcome to the Loud Numbers Devlog - a weekly newsletter about how we’re building a data sonification podcast called Loud Numbers.
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Release Schedule
It feels pretty crazy that the first season of Loud Numbers is almost complete. We’ve been working on this project in our spare time for about 18 months, and in a little over a week it’ll be out there in the public. Or at least the first episode will. Here’s how it’s all going to go down.
On 5 June, we’ll be hosting the Loud Numbers Sonification Festival - collecting together a group of sonification experts for a series of talks, Q&As and workshops, starting at 4pm London time. You should definitely come along. Add the event to your Google Calendar with this link, and visit YouTube to set yourself a reminder.
The same day, we’ll be releasing the first episode of Loud Numbers - The Natural Lottery. It tells the story of a small town in Alaska called Nenana, whose inhabitants have the annual tradition of betting on when the ice in the Tanana river will break up. We’ve turned their records - which date back to 1917 - into a climate-techno track, which is both terrifying and dancefloor-ready in equal measure.
You’ll be able to listen to the track two ways. Most people will want to listen to the podcast version - which tells the story of the data and explains how we turned it into music, before playing the final track. Subscribe to the podcast through your favourite podcast client to make sure you get that in your feed. Apple and a few other platforms are taking their sweet time to approve us, so add the RSS feed manually if you need to.
You can also listen to just the track alone. We’ll be releasing each track as a single on all good streaming services at the same time as the podcast episode is released. Perfect for adding to your summer playlists. If you’re a Spotify user, then go to our artist page and click “Follow” so that you get our releases in your Release Radar playlist.
Subsequent episodes will be released every two weeks on Mondays. Which means the dates for your diary are 21 June (Tasting Notes), 5 July (Boom & Bust), 19 July (A Symphony of Bureaucracy) and 2 August (The End of the Road). Once they’re all out, we’ll release a Loud Numbers EP on streaming services that contains all of the tracks in one place. And we’d like to do a remix EP too - that would be fun. Let us know if you’d like to contribute to that.
Composition
We’re still putting the final touches on A Symphony of Bureaucracy - it’s a classical fugue, which requires a lot of tricky compositional work, so it took us a little longer than originally expected. But 99/136 bars are done and, crucially, we now know where the rest is going!
The biggest challenge of doing this is that there are always a fixed number of bars to fill and we need to get from X to Y, key-wise, in that time frame. So we’ve been sketching out many, many versions of the chords that the music will pass through, trying to make the harmonic rhythms sound natural. And finally we’ve got a solution. So barring unexpected events, that’ll come together in the next week or so, and we can get the master and the edit done in time for release.
Press
Otherwise, most of the work this week has been putting together our press pack and figuring out who to send it to. We’re defining “press” pretty loosely, so if you’re someone with a blog or a newsletter or a YouTube channel or something else, and you’re interested in sharing our work, then hit reply on this message and we’ll wing it over to you. There are some goodies in there, like a preview of the first track and explanation of the sonification system.
We’ve got a few appearances on other podcasts booked too - which we’re pretty excited about. We’ll share more on those when they’re due to come out.
That’s it for today. We’re on the home straight. See you again in a week!
- Duncan and Miriam