On Standby - a sonification to sleep to
Hello friends,
We're Duncan and Miriam, and together we're Loud Numbers - a data sonification studio. We've got a bunch of exciting new projects to share with you below, but first 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.
On Standby
We've completed work on our longest sonification ever, and it'll be released this week. On Standby is a 10-hour composition, designed to be slept to, that brings together music, sound art and radio documentary techniques to ask questions about the way we use energy. Here's a one-minute trailer:
Seven volunteers used smart plugs to collect data about the energy use of different devices overnight. One person monitored their fridge, another their boiler, another their mobile phone charger, and more. We turned the resulting data into a piece of music that lasts from 10pm - the time the first person went to sleep - to 8:40am, when the last of our volunteers woke up.
We designed a unique sound signature for each device, and every time that device uses half a watt-hour of energy (about the same quantity needed to boil a teaspoon of water) you'll hear its sound. Some play out at regular intervals throughout the whole night. Others pulse up and down as their energy use changes.
Over the course of the night, you'll also hear some human voices - we interviewed our data collectors about their sleep habits, how they think about energy use in their homes, and what words they associate with nighttime. We also commissioned the poet Anna Arvidsdotter to create and perform a new piece of work, and we spoke to Nick Trapp from Bristol's Centre for Sustainable Energy about how people should think about their overnight energy use.
We have a series of playback sessions planned where you can listen to the whole piece in real-time. Here's a list:
- 2024-11-29 @ 10pm Sweden time (UTC+1): NGBG Radio
- 2024-11-29 @ 10pm UK time (UTC): Soundart Radio
- 2024-12-02 @ 10pm Europe time (UTC+1): YouTube Live
- 2024-12-03 @ 10pm Chicago time (UTC-5): YouTube Live
- 2024-12-05 @ 10pm Beijing time (UTC+8): YouTube Live
Those first two broadcasts are this coming Friday (at the time of writing). So mark your calendar. You can also tune into NGBG Radio a little earlier in the evening (6pm local time) where you'll be able to hear a little more from us about the project, and also from some of our data collectors.
You'll also be able to buy/stream the audio from 9 December, on your favourite streaming service or on our Bandcamp page.
We're actively looking for more places to broadcast On Standby, so if you know a local radio station interested in sound art who might have a place for this kind of work then please drop us an email. You can just hit reply to this message.
The Sonification Awards
We've talked a few times in this newsletter in the past about our work building an awards programme for the sonification community, and we're excited to announce that applications are now open!
We've worked together with the community to put together criteria for what makes an "excellent sonification" in three categories - art, communication, and analysis. Every sonification submitted that is judged to meet the criteria in its category will be an equal winner. Essentially it's more like a Michelin star than an Oscar.
Any sonification that was released in the last two years is eligible for entry. The deadline for submissions is the end of the year. Check out the criteria and submit your work at sonificationawards.org.
We're also looking for people to volunteer to be judges. The only criteria there is that you need to have created and published at least one sonification. Otherwise you're good to go, no matter how qualified or unqualified you feel. Sign up here.
Scientific American
It's not quite sonification, but I'm sure that Loud Numbers fans would be interested to hear about a bit of work we did recently for Scientific American magazine.
It's a visual summary of a scientific paper which gathered together recordings of folk songs from all kinds of cultures around the world, comparing them to recordings of speech from the same cultures to see how the two differ, and whether those differences are consistent from culture to culture.
We developed a collection of visualizations to show this - a map of the language locations, a bunch of slopecharts for speed, pitch height and pitch stability, and then a deep dive into two recordings in particular - sung and spoken versions of the folk song Scarborough Fair.
The whole piece looks beautiful in the magazine. It's also online here. If you can't afford a subscription, then you can use this link to access an archived version, but please consider supporting the magazine, which is supporting us!
Listening to the Earth
Our podcast episode Hold the Line, which turns data on last year's record-breaking Canadian wildfire season into sound, is included in a new online exhibition, Listening to the Earth.
Listening to the Earth is part of British Council Hong Kong's SPARK Festival 2024 and features tons of interesting environmental sonifications, soundscapes, and field recordings. Do check it out.
In the organisers' words:
"As global health crises and environmental upheavals highlight the intrinsic ties between individual and societal wellbeing and planetary health, this project embraces the notion of 'sonification'---using cutting-edge methodologies to convert ecological data into sound, to tap into hidden rhythms, from seismic activity to changes in air quality, human health and environmental change."
Decibels
Interested in trying out sonification? We help run a friendly and welcoming sonification community over at decibels.community. There are spaces to ask questions, share your work, find an audience, and exchange tips. You can also just join and hang out. Go sign up here.
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.
- The fantastic folks at SoniFriday performed at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg this year, with several tracks made from different datasets. They explain the whole process in a blog post.
- Neil DeGrasse Tyson featured sonification artist Kimberly Arcand on his podcast recently, in an episode titled "Listening to the Universe".
- The Open Space Project sonifies various bits of data about the solar system.
- Georgios Cherouvim has been pairing sonification with animation for almost a decade, most recently with GeoSynth - a prototype instrument that uses 3D geometries as audio samples.
Spotted or created something we should feature here? Hit reply and tell us about it.
We'll be back in touch again in the next couple of months with another update, most likely involving one of the most popular sitcoms of the 90s. In the meantime, drop us an email if you have anything you'd like to chat about!
- Duncan and Miriam