Devlog #5
Hey there, we're Miriam & Duncan and you're a member of the super-secret behind-the-scenes Loud Numbers club. The secret is that you get an email every week or so talking about how the development of our data sonification podcast is going. Don't tell anyone!
This week was all about beer. Miriam added several new elements to the sound corresponding to aroma and taste parameters:
- The sweetness of a beer is represented by a pleasant, harmonious chord on a synth pad.
- Acidity is represented by a jazzy horn flourish. It hits you after a slight delay then comes back with a final kick, the way an acidic taste makes you wince then wince again (think tequila and lime face). The acidity sound is related to the sound for the hop aroma, since hops often taste acidic.
- Bitterness is represented by
a Roland TB-303 synthesizera Sonic Pi synth that sounds very similar to a Roland TB-303 synthesizer. That’s the squelchy vintage synth used in every early 90s house track. I mapped the level of bitterness in each beer to the amplitude, 303 cutoff, and the complexity / dissonance of the harmony. - Alcohol is the woozy sound related to fermentation. The amount of alcohol is mapped to the amplitude and amount of pitch bend. It fades in and out to mimic breathing (booze breath, basically).
- The total duration of the sound is mapped to the total duration of the taste and aftertaste: 10, 20 or 60 seconds. Alcohol and bitterness last longer than sweetness in the mouth so the sounds also go on for longer. Bitterness is last to disappear – it leaves a bitter aftertaste.
We also did some data processing and tightened up the code, defining arrays as e.g. aroma = (0..5).to_a rather than specifying min and max separately. We made the min of all scores zero and set amplitude for the minimum value in the range so that if that taste is not present at all, the sound simply doesn’t play.
All the taste and aroma variables are now mapped, except intensity - instead intensity is basically the amplitude of all the others put together.
That's the core of the sonification done - all that's left to do now is a little more polishing to make it sound great. Then we'll do the interview with our cicerone, and finish the first draft of the script.
We can't wait for you to hear it!