Episode Four: A Symphony of Bureaucracy
Hello sonification crew. How have you been? We’re Miriam and Duncan, and 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.
A Symphony of Bureaucracy
Episode four of Loud Numbers was released this morning. It’s called “A Symphony of Bureaucracy” and it’s a classical piece about the history of the European Union. You can listen to it at loudnumbers.net.
Here’s how it works. We took a database of all the laws ever passed by the EU, or any of its precursor bodies, and used them as the foundation for a fugue - a complex musical form that features several interweaving melodies. Each of those melodies begins with a specific theme - we used the beginning of the European Anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy - and then plays with it while weaving in and out of the other melodies.
The sonification in the track is relatively simple - we took the number of laws passed by the EU over time, and mapped that to the number of melodies you can hear at any one time. When lots of laws are being passed, you hear lots of melodies, and when there are fewer you only hear one or two melodies.
Fun fact: we didn’t actually finish this one until couple of weeks before the launch of the podcast, and that’s because it was very complicated to write. Unlike our other sonifications , we wrote this one by hand - and at some points, there are eight different melodies playing at once. Getting eight simultaneous melodic lines to sound like music, rather than the audio version of mixing all the paint colours together, was a real challenge.
We played with some other ideas for this one - using different instruments (or sections of the orchestra) to represent laws being passed about different things (e.g. healthcare, migration, finance). This didn’t pan out because the laws weren’t very well-coded in that regard, and we hit again on the problem of people needing to remember a complex sound legend.
In the end, we chose to use synthesizers to play the music - partly to pay homage to the European pioneers of electronic music like Wendy Carlos, partly because it gives the whole thing a lovely retro-futuristic vibe, and partly because we didn’t have any budget to recruit a whole orchestra.
If you do have handy access to an orchestra (a small one would do, you only need eight voices), then here’s the full score for the piece. We’d love to see it being played live!
This is the penultimate episode of Loud Numbers. In two weeks we’ll release our final instalment - The End of the Road. Look out for that on 2 August.
xox
- Duncan & Miriam