Episode Three: Boom & Bust
Hello sonification friends! 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.
Boom & Bust
Episode three of Loud Numbers was released this morning at 4am UK time, meaning that we’re officially half way through the first season of our podcast!
Boom & Bust is a particularly fun one. We’ve sonified the economy of the United States over the last 60 years, with perhaps the simplest data-sound mapping in the entire series. Each bar of track time represents one financial quarter. If the US economy was in recession during that quarter, we play a drum loop backwards. If it was in procession (a new word for us! The opposite of “recession”), then we play it forwards. Couldn’t be simpler.
So we jazzed it up a bit. Or actually, we jungled it up a bit. The track is modelled after the rave-inflected breakbeats of early 90s UK jungle music, which means loads of airhorns and backspins (which also track procession and recession respectively), deep basslines (which play on election years), and a wispy, magical synth sound that represents the Dow Jones industrial average, wafting up into the stratosphere.
You’ll also hear a lot of samples. These are mostly so you can position yourself in the timeline - you’ll hear Jimmy Carter speaking when he’s president, and people talking about the dot-com boom when it’s happening. In fact this is possibly the first track in the history of music to sample both Ronald Reagan and Tupac. There are plenty of nerdy in-jokes, for those who are paying attention, including an extra-special sample that drops the same year that jungle music emerges, and one that tracks inequality over the timespan covered by the sonification.
The chipmunk sample at the start? It’s from the excellent and very sweary British comedy show The Thick of It (warning: don’t click that link if you have children in the room).
Two more episodes to come. We’ll be back in your inbox on 19 July with a Symphony of Bureaucracy.
xox
- Duncan & Miriam
p.s. Those of you who’ve been following us for a while will be familiar with this track, as we actually premiered it back in January at the Outlier conference. It’s had a few small tweaks since then to make it sound as good as possible, so check out the new version on streaming services!