The End of Loud Numbers Season One
Hello friends. We're Miriam and Duncan, and this is the last episode (for now) of the Loud Numbers Development Log. You're getting this message because you signed up at loudnumbers.net, and you can unsubscribe with the link in the footer.
It's a wrap! Loud Numbers Season One is complete! We've created five fantastic sonifications - The Natural Lottery, Tasting Notes, Boom & Bust, A Symphony of Bureaucracy, and The End of the Road. They're all available to listen to right now wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for "Loud Numbers".
You can also listen to them as individual tracks, without the commentary. We've released all five of the season one tracks as an album which was released on all good streaming services today. Here it is on Spotify, for example. Add your favourites to your playlists and play them to your friends and family.
This is the behind-the-scenes development log, though, so we also wanted to round up all the other things we've done over the last 18 months to make this podcast possible. Here's an approximately comprehensive list:
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Carefully assemble a collection of compelling data stories that work within the confines of both the podcast and sonification formats.
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Hunt down the data necessary to tell those stories, and clean and process it to get it ready for sonification. We did this primarily in Google Sheets.
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Pick a platform to use to create the sonifications. After much research we settled on Sonic Pi, which is a coding language for music based on Ruby. We had to learn Ruby from scratch in the process.
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Develop the sonifications themselves - choosing how to link up the sound and data, and fitting those choices into a genre framework that worked with the stories. This involved a loooooooot of trial and error.
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Turn those sonifications into music in digital audio workstation (DAW) software. We chose Logic Pro for this, because we were most familiar with it, but there are a lot of free options too that would work just fine.
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Get the sonifications properly mastered so they sound good on every device they're played on. This was the only thing we paid someone else to do - we hired Queer Ear Mastering in Berlin, who did a fantastic job.
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Develop scripts for each episode, introducing the story and explaining the sonification. We used Google Docs for this, which allowed us to write, comment, and edit the scripts asynchronously.
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Design a visual and auditory brand for Loud Numbers, including logo, cover art, theme tune (intro and outro), background music, and sound design.
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Record the spoken scripts, interviews, and other bits and pieces in audiophile quality. We used Zencastr for this.
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Edit all the episodes together - voice, snippets of audio, background music, and of course the episodes themselves. We used Logic Pro here again.
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Write show notes for each episode, including the script, to boost accessibility and allow people to quickly grab data, links or a reference without having to listen all the way through each episode.
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Build a website from scratch to house all this. We coded loudnumbers.net by hand in HTML and CSS without any fancy frameworks or anything, and hosted it on Github Pages.
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Figure out how to host a podcast and distribute it to the many different listening streams. We used Anchor.fm for this.
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Figure out how to upload five singles and an album to all the many different streaming services. We used Distrokid for this.
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Keep up a social media presence on Twitter (every weekday!), Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn (less often). We used Airtable for scheduling content, and posted it manually rather than scheduling posts.
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Keep an eye on what's happening in the wider community - both to fill out our Airtable of social media content and also to help bring attention to other sonification artists. A rising tide lifts all boats.
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Write a weekly newsletter, working in public and building our audience up slowly over time. This was a really smart move in retrospect, and we'd highly recommend it to anyone else working on a long-term project. We use and love Buttondown.
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Write press releases, assemble a media list and send personal emails to a huge pile of journalists about the launch of the podcast in the hope of getting some press coverage. Success rate: Maybe 2%? In retrospect this was a total waste of time.
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Give talks and interviews at various events. We've done quite a lot of these! Our favourite was our Outlier talk, which had a wonderful response and was one of the first times we shared our work publicly.
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Design a beautiful selection of t-shirts to allow people to show their love for our podcast and for sonification more widely.
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Plan and run an eight-hour sonification festival, with a diverse collection of speakers from across the sonification community.
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Become friends and stay that way while still pushing the project forward over eighteen months, despite living in totally different countries. We kept things organized with Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, and weekly check-in video calls - even if it didn't seem like we had much to talk about. Fun fact: we've only met in person twice, and not at all since the project began. It's totally possible to do this kind of collaboration entirely online.
That was a longer list than I was expecting it would be when I started writing it. Phew. We've done a lot. But there are so many fiddly little things to think about when you want to do something properly. We weren't tempted once to take shortcuts. What would be the point?
You might be wondering what we're planning to do next. Well, this email list will go dormant for a while as we focus on client work and other projects. You might get an email from us later in the year because we're working on a remix album of the tracks from season one, but otherwise you won't hear from us in a while.
We're very interested in making a second season of Loud Numbers in due course. If you work for a company that might be interested in sponsoring such a thing, then drop us a message. You'll have a direct line to a highly engaged audience of people interested in the fascinating intersection of data and creativity.
You can also commission the Loud Numbers sonification studio to make a one-off piece of work for you - which is something we've done for a few clients now. Hit reply to this email and let's have a chat.
With those last bits of business is out of the way, it just leaves us to deliver an enormous THANKYOU to you. Yes, you. Thanks for listening to, sharing and supporting Loud Numbers over the last year. Without the Loud Numbers community cheering us on, we might never have got this project over the line, so an enormous thanks for being a part of it all.
xox
- Duncan and Miriam