Devlog #7
Hey folks. I’m Duncan, and this is the Loud Numbers Super Secret newsletter, which arrives in your inbox every Friday with an update on how we’re building the world’s first data sonification podcast.
Those who read last week’s newsletter will know that the next subject we’re sonifying is Brexit. This is a topic that my co-collaborator Miriam and I have mixed feelings about on many levels.
When we chose it as a subject to feature back in January, we (and the entirety of the British population) were sick of hearing about it. We’d had three years of nothing in the news except Brexit. So we thought it would be interesting to hear what that sounded like. Right now it’s firmly out of the news cycle due to COVID-19, but by the time the podcast is released it’ll no doubt be back again.
Mining data from the Guardian API, we discovered that the Guardian alone had published an incredible 36,951 articles between the date of the referendum (23 June 2016) and the date of Britain leaving the EU (1 Feb 2020). That’s an average of 28 per day, just on the Guardian.
We would love data from other publications, but it’s not available so we're using the Guardian as a proxy for all media coverage. That's obviously an imperfect solution (the Guardian had a clear political viewpoint on Brexit) but we reckon it’s likely that the activity trends should be similar elsewhere.
We're combining the Guardian articles data with a few other opinion datasets - public opinion polling on the result of the referendum, petitions that were launched on the government's petitions website, and the value of the pound against the Euro. Together they tell an astonishing story.
We have ideas for how we want to sonify all this. But we'd love to hear from you - what sounds and types of music do you associate with Brexit? And what other data should we include? Hit reply and let us know.
Otherwise, this week has been a fairly quiet one as Miriam and I have been paying the bills with work on other projects.
We shared a few nice bits and bobs on Twitter. We found a collection of tutorials for using Sonic Pi (a live-coding music environment which is our sonification platform of choice).
We came across research showing that people perceive chocolate bars as more bitter when their name contains more consonants.
Finally, we did a bit of research into the legality of sampling political speeches (both for the Brexit sonification and another one which we’ll talk about in due course). The answer, as with all these kinds of things, is “it’s complicated”.
Next week we’re hoping to finish off the last few bits of the beer sonification and get started in earnest with the Brexit piece.
In the meantime, remember that you can hit reply on any of our emails to let us know about cool sonifications that you’ve seen, interesting music/data art pieces, or anything else you think we might find fascinating. We love hearing from you.
Catch you next week.