Episode Five: The End of the Road
Hi there sonification fans. The hour is finally upon us. The last episode of Loud Numbers season one has been released. More on that below.
First though, the usual formalities. This is the Loud Numbers Development Log - a newsletter where we talk about how we've put together the world's first podcast turning data into music. You're getting it because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe any time with the link in the footer.
The End of the Road
Before we started working on Loud Numbers, we had some idea that there aren't as many insects around today as there used to be. We'd skimmed some news stories, knew the situation was "bad" and stopped there.
But oh my god, it's so much worse than "bad".
The final episode of Loud Numbers, The End of the Road, sonifies a dataset of insect species decline, which was collected by a Danish researcher named Anders Pape Møller over the last few decades in a rather unconventional way. He counted the number of bugs splattering on the windscreen of his car every summer since 1997. He found an 80-97% reduction over that time period, even when controlling for factors like weather and time of day.
You could write this off as a single, unusual example - an outlier, as data folks call it. But the story is the same elsewhere. Land-based insect populations are falling by 1.1% every year. The End of the Road is a requiem for all of those untold billions of insects that humans are slaughtering.
You might think this is good news - fewer creepy crawlies in the world. But the problem is that these insects sit at the bottom of the food chain, and if I've learnt anything from Jenga it's that when you start pulling out the bricks at the bottom of a tower, it doesn't take long before the whole thing comes crashing down. Humans? We're perched right at the top of that tower, with the farthest to fall.
So how to sonify this in a way that brings forward the emotional punch of this dataset? We created a soundscape of a road at night, not unlike those driven by Møller. We laid a bassline over the top, which is inspired by both Yo La Tengo's Night Falls On Hoboken and the unsettling Dies Irae sequence, and we played a funeral bell every time a year goes by in the data.
The number of insects splattered onto Møller's car each month is represented by the number of fluttering synth sounds in a bar. Higher sounds represent smaller insects, while lower sounds correspond to larger insects. As the number of insects falls, the sounds fall silent and the track empties out.
Finally, there's a synth pad with a falling melody based on the measured 1.1% per year decline in global land-based insect populations. Every time insect numbers fall 5%, the melody drops down a note.
Those are pretty much all the musical layers you need to worry about.
This email marks the final episode of Loud Numbers Season One, but it isn't the end of Loud Numbers. In two weeks, we'll be in your inbox again wrapping up the season with a link to every sonification we covered, as well as some details about what we're planning next.
After that we'll go quiet on this newsletter until there's something new to talk about. Maybe a remix album? We'll see later in the year!
Until then, hit play on The End of the Road, and maybe don't squish the next insect you see...
xox
- Miriam & Duncan