Hold the Line, Season One Remixes and Open Sonifications
Hello friends,
We're Duncan and Miriam, and together we're Loud Numbers - a data sonification studio. It's been a while since you last heard from us, but we've been hard at work on a bunch of different projects, which you can read about below.
A quick reminder: you're getting this email because you signed up for our newsletter, probably at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe at any time with the link in the footer.
Hold the Line
We've completed work on a new episode of the Loud Numbers podcast - it's called Hold the Line, and it centres on Canada's record-breaking 2023 wildfire season, featuring eyewitness narration from Fern Yip of the Earthkin Wilderness School.
It follows the same format as all our other episodes - we introduce the story, we explain the sonification, and then you'll hear it played out in full. In the music, every single fire that was reported by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fires Centre between 1 April and 30 November is represented by a click sound, with each real-world day playing out over 2.5 seconds of sound, marked by the duration of a bass note.
Fires started by humans are represented by the distinctive 'ting' sound of a Zippo lighter, fires that started naturally by the sound of wood crackling (which sounds like a high click), and fires of unknown cause by a generic ignition sound (which sounds like a low-pitched lighter flicking on). During the worst of the season, you'll hear more than 220 fires in a single day.
The background rumble represents the area of forest that burned that day. The larger the area burned that day, the louder, harsher and longer-lasting the sound. When many large fires burn for days, the rumbles blend into a roar. You'll also hear a growing stack of musical notes that represent the cumulative area that has been burnt. As more forest is burned over time, more notes are added to the stack.
The episode was created in partnership with the fantastic Data is Plural podcast, which has published its own episode on the subject - interviewing Bruce Macnab, head of Canada's Wildland Fire Information System about how his team gathers information, the obstacles they face, how they deal with uncertainty and varying source quality, and how their approach has changed in the decade since the project launched
You can hear the episode right here, or from wherever you get your podcasts - just search for "Loud Numbers". You can also read the show notes, and listen to the music on its own without the introduction on Bandcamp, and all good (and many bad) streaming services.
Season One Remixes
Right after we finished season one of Loud Numbers, we asked around to see if anyone wanted to try remixing one of our tracks. To our surprise, a bunch of folks did! So earlier this year we published an album of remixes of our Season One music.
It includes Saint Silva tackling the End of the Road, Wimperis remixing Tasting Notes, Cotter Koopman working with both Boom & Bust and the Loud Numbers theme music, Jason Forrest's "Trickledown Aftermath" of Boom & Bust, and a ambient remix of The Natural Lottery that Duncan made.
Again, you'll find the album on Bandcamp and all good streaming services.
Open Sonifications
Duncan has been working with Jordan Wirfs-Brock and Jamie Perera on an extension of some of the thinking we've been doing about how we can make sonification more open and accessible to more audiences. Together, we've developed a manifesto for "open sonifications" which you can find at opensonifications.net.
We've submitted a paper to a design conference in Copenhagen in July where we'll hopefully get to talk about it in depth, and we'll also be speaking about it at a notable dataviz conference in June which we're not yet allowed to name. Look out for more details on that in a future email.
In the meantime, if you have any questions then hit reply to this email or drop us a line at opensonifications@gmail.com.
The Carrington Event
Following our last email, where we talked about investigating more live sonification opportunities, Duncan has been working with Ben Dexter-Cooley to put together a performance called The Carrington Event, based on the 1859 solar megastorm of the same name.
Duncan's 20-minute long performance transforms data from observatories monitoring the Earth's magnetic field at the time into a roaring maelstrom of guitar, modular synths, and shortwave radio recordings. He's written up a bit about the background and the process over on his blog.
He'll be performing it at STPLN in Malmö on 20 April, but we understand that this is (a) kinda short notice for many of you to get on a train to Sweden, and (b) there may not even be a train that goes from where you live to Sweden. So after the performance, we'll be making a recording of the piece and sharing it. Look out for more on that in the coming months.
Elsewhere in Sonification
This is a short round-up of sonification news, links, and other stuff that's caught our eye in the last few months.
- MINING's new album, Chimet, is a sonification of weather data from a buoy in the sea off the coast of England during Storm Ophelia in October 2017.
- Guy Birkin's new album, Rushed Snares, includes sonifications of different integer sequences. He's written up the process on his blog.
- Guy also shared a sonification of COVID virus genome sequence data, as part of a compilation for Hard Return that focuses on repetition. The DNA bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T) are mapped to four drum sounds: kick, snare, hat and clap, making a non-repeating rhythm.
- Max has been working on a wonderful sonification of fermentation processes in different kinds of foods. Her Microbial Symphony is a work-in-progress, but it's already sounding amazing.
- Kofi / Illestpreacha has shared a sonification of signed distance functions in Sonic Pi that he made for Genuary 2024.
- Aura Walmer created a wonderful sonification of the recent US eclipse, titled "Path of Totality".
- On 19 April in London, there'll be a celebration of biodata sonification at Evolutionary Arts Hackney.
- The CODAP Sonify plugin that was developed as part of the COVID-Inspired Data Science Education through Epidemiology project is now publicly available as a built-in plugin in CODAP.
- Turns out that making alarms (a sonification of an event) more musical can save lives.
- Storybench shares a collection of tools (including several of ours) to sonify data.
Phew, what a lot of cool stuff! If you've done something with sonification recently then let us know about it by hitting reply and we'll include it in our next issue.
We'll be back in touch again in the next couple of months with another update - in the meantime, drop us an email if you have anything you'd like to chat about!
- Duncan and Miriam