Our Loudest and Longest Sonifications Ever
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.
The Carrington Event
The main occasion for this newsletter is that our newest project has just been released! It's an audiovisual exploration of the strongest geomagnetic storm on record, The Carrington Event, from 1859.
As long-term readers will know, this piece began life as a collaboration with Ben Dexter Cooley (St. Silva) on how sonification can be done in a live context. We picked a dataset together, and then both developed performances from it. Ours leans towards a post-rock palette, Ben's towards a more ambient arrangement. Recordings of the two performances were released on French netlabel Camembert Électrique in September 2024. You can listen to the recordings on Bandcamp.
We also partnered with the amazing multimedia artist supermarket_sallad to create visuals for the Loud Numbers version. He put together a series of scenes in Touchdesigner which Duncan "played" with a midi controller to create the video for the track. The whole audiovisual experience was exhibited at the Thrive & Nurture exhibition in Malmö, Sweden, in September 2024. You can watch it on YouTube.
Finally, Ben and Duncan have written up a whole tonne of liner and process notes about the background and composition of the two tracks. You can find all that over on the Loud Numbers website.
In Conversation
Earlier in the year, Duncan was interviewed by the tworoundrobins YouTube channel about his work turning data into music, on climate awareness, and on building tools for doing sonification work. It was a fun and wide-ranging chat, with lots of talk about the ethics and importance of creating art for a purpose. Check out the conversation over on YouTube.
Open Sonifications
Earlier this year, we talked about a conference paper that we worked on with Jordan Wirfs-Brock and Jamie Perera - and now it's been published. Our Open Sonifications Manifesto is a call for more diverse and human approaches to sonification. Here's a snippet:
Open Sonifications invites all people, regardless of training or background, to use data and sound to make sense of themselves and the world. Anyone can do this! We hope this manifesto can lead to increased intersectional diversity, including more women, youth, and people with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ identities. We hope to make sonification a welcoming practice, by integrating overlooked dimensions of sonification, such as location, community, and agency of the sonifier. It's ok to be messy and make mistakes! It's ok to feel! We embrace the emotional aspects of experiencing sound, rather than treating them as a byproduct. We seek more awareness of deep listening and bodily sensations as a knowledge-generating step of the sonification process.
Read the whole 15-page manifesto over at opensonifications.net.
Or watch this two-minute summary instead:
On Standby
Right now, we're hard at work on a large new project. It's called On Standby, and it's an 10-hour-long, 1:1 timescale, ambient sonification of the overnight energy use of different electrical devices in the home, designed to be listened to while sleeping. Volunteers collected energy use data from seven different devices, and each time one of them uses a specific amount of energy, you hear a signature sound associated with that device.
This is a new one for us - both in terms of the sheer length of the piece, and in creating a piece of music designed to be slept to. It has some similarities with our podcast work, in that there are several spoken-word segments - encompassing interviews with our data collection volunteers and an energy saving expert, and even a poem, from poet Anna Arvidsdotter, that we commissioned specifically for this piece.
You'll hear more about this project in due course - we'll be scheduling some slumber parties for late November, where people in timezones all across the world will be able to listen to the full piece while sleeping.
We're also looking for community radio partners, so if you know someone you think would be interested in an overnight broadcast of this piece then please introduce us - you can just reply to this message.
Live Sonification
Our first experiment with creating a live data sonification concert experience was the Carrington Event earlier this year, which is detailed above. But we're not stopping there. Duncan has been playing a set of music compiled from orbital data on the International Space Station and other artificial satellites. You can watch a livestreamed version over on YouTube.
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 Guardian has been trialling sonification for accessibility in some of its data stories, like this one about plummeting birthrates.
- The exoplanets of red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 supply the data for this beautiful sonification from pianist Dan Tepfer.
- Bandcamp profiled a trio of sonification artists - Voices of the Cosmos, Lustmord and Mining.
- Lutz Bornmann wrote about sonification as an alternative to dataviz, featuring a couple of our pieces.
- An evolving soundscape derived from live colour data, by friend-of-Loud-Numbers Ben Dexter Cooley.
- Aura Walmer is doing some fantastic work building a web-based sonification toolkit for journalists. Check out her introductory blog post.
- Astronomer Kimberly Arcand talks to Neil deGrasse Tyson about sonification on his podcast, Startalk.
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 - in the meantime, drop us an email if you have anything you'd like to chat about!
- Duncan and Miriam