Spiders Song, UFO and Code Snippets
Hello friends,
We’re Duncan and Miriam, and together we’re Loud Numbers - a data sonification studio. 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.
Spiders Song
Our collaboration with the Future Ecologies podcast is live! Spiders Song is a story about a quest to hear the greatest symphony on Earth: the music of evolution. Along the way, you get to know some of nature’s most surprising musicians — the paradise jumping spiders.
Loud Numbers helped Mendel and the Future Ecologies team to create a deep, compelling sonification of jumping spider phylogenetic trees - an unconventional data format for sonification! You’ll hear our work in part two, but be sure to listen to part one beforehand for the background and to learn how to dance like a spider.
As well as in the podcast, you can read the full details about how the sonification works, and download the MaxMSP patch used to create it, over on the Future Ecologies website.
UFO now orbiting
Duncan has released a script for the Norns music computer (a kind of open-source musical gameboy), which uses the position of the International Space Station above the Earth’s surface to modulate the tone and timbre of sound - like a giant, Ultra-low Frequency Oscillator (“ufo” for short).
The ISS orbits Earth every 90 minutes or so, and so if you track its latitude and longitude then you’ll get a sine wave for the former, and a ramp wave for the latter. The script generates an internal supersaw (ISS) drone composed by Jonathan Synder. The latitude of the ISS is mapped to filter cutoff and modulation depth. The longitude is mapped to reverb absorption. Finally, the detune parameter of the supersaw is mapped to the distance between the ISS and a location specified by the user.
You can hear what the script sounds like, and download it if you own a Norns, over on Duncan’s blog.
Decibels
Decibels is a small, friendly community for people interested in data sonification. We run it along with some other sonification friends. If you’re interested in a place to hang out online with other sonification folks, you’ll love it - we recently crested 200 members, and have been working hard on a document full of code snippets for Sonic Pi. Join us at http://decibels.community.
Miriam interviewed on BCfm
Community radio station BCfm interviewed Miriam recently on her work combining environmental science and the visual arts. It covers both her sonification work and her work with data physicalization and visualization. If you’re in the field of science communication, you’ll find it an interesting listen.
DivAirCity
Miriam also appeared recently at a DivAirCity event, talking about the transformative power of communication and how it can be inclusive. “Sometimes you need to find a new way to tell a story and a different method of communicating to make people see the subject anew”, she said. There’s a recording of the discussion on the Equilibrium Network’s website.
Asteroid Day
Both Duncan and Miriam’s faces, if not our bodies, appeared at Asteroid Day Festival in Luxembourg - talking again about the power of sonification and what kind of data works best with sonification. Want us to speak at your event? Email us at numbersloud@gmail.com.
LSE Workshop
Oh, and we also love to give workshops on sonification. Recently, Miriam gave a workshop to a group of enthusiastic participants at the London School of Economics, who learnt how to do sonification without technology. Hit us up if you want us to run a workshop for you!
Elsewhere in Sonification
This is a short round-up of sonification news, links, and other stuff that’s caught our eye.
Walker Smith’s sonifications of chemical elements and the sound of molecules are a fantastic showcase of what sonification can do in a teaching and learning context.
Sonecules is an upcoming sonification architecture for Python.
How sounds can turn us on to the wonders of the universe, from MIT Technology Review.
Got five minutes? Take this survey on the effectiveness of a sonification of coral reef bleaching.
Sonic Antarctica by Andrea Polli
Skooby Laposky wants you to listen to nature.
If you’ve done something cool 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 later this year with another update. In the meantime, drop us an email if you have anything you’d like to chat about!
- Duncan and Miriam