Wildfires, Awards and Getting Started With Sonification
Hello friends,
We're Miriam and Duncan, the duo behind Loud Numbers - the studio that turns data into sound. We've got some exciting new work to share with you below, but first, a quick heads-up: you're receiving this email because you subscribed to our newsletter, likely via loudnumbers.net. If you ever want out, there's an unsubscribe link waiting for you at the bottom.
Scorched Earth
We have a new project out: Scorched Earth. This artwork was originally commissioned last year for the excellent Nature's Harmony exhibition in Helsingborg, Sweden and because of exclusivity rules we had to sit on it for a bit. But! Its exclusivity period has recently expired, so we can now share it here with you lovely people.
Scorched Earth is an audiovisual piece built from 2018's daily fire data from the Swedish region of Skåne. It's a blend of data sonification and audio-reactive visuals, drawing sonic inspiration from horror soundtracks, folk traditions, and 20th-century string music.
Here's how it works. Each second of the track represents a day; each new week begins with a deep string note and a new tree ring appears on the graphic. Each and every fire is marked by a click sound -- 747 in total -- with three different tones based on the fire's cause: natural, human, or unknown. The year begins with the sparse clicks of winter; they accelerate and fill out the texture as we move into the warmth of spring and the heat of summer.
When the area burned exceeds a certain threshold, a low, rumbling roar kicks in, growing louder and harsher as the destruction increases. That same roar also controls the thickness of each animated tree ring.
A rising scale played on strings mirrors the total area burned across the year - starting low and stacking higher, echoing the cumulative pressure wildfires place on infrastructure, services, and people's lives. The notes linger on right to the end of the track, the way fires leave an area of scorched earth behind, even after they've gone out. Fifty-two rings have now been added to the graphic -- one for each week of the year. They block out the entire screen.
You can listen to it over on YouTube - oh, and we just heard that it won a Data Sonification Award (see below) and was also longlisted for the 2025 Information is Beautiful Awards too, so that's nice, isn't it?
Data Sonification Awards
Alongside Scorched Earth, another three of our sonifications have been awarded in the first ever Data Sonification Awards. This is a new annual event that celebrates excellence in transforming data into sound, which we've been part of helping to organise.
Unlike traditional competitions, the Data Sonification Awards doesn't rank entries with gold, silver, or bronze distinctions. Instead, a set of tight criteria for excellence are defined by experts, and all the submissions that meet them are celebrated equally. The idea is to help to push the field forward by fostering a collaborative spirit within the data sonification community, emphasising shared achievement over competition.
The awards span three categories: Arts, Communication, and Analysis. We won three awards in the Arts category:
- Bristol Burning, our dub track based on a year of city air quality data, featuring vocalist T. Relly.
- The Carrington Event, a 17-minute live sonification-slash-multilayered-guitar-freakout based on geomagnetic data from the 1859 solar storm of the same name that one listener described as 'surprisingly metal'. Our track shares the award with St. Silva's softer, more ambient realisation of the same data, released on the same EP. Read more about how we created them.
- Scorched Earth: The one with the Swedish wildfires mentioned above.
And one in the Communication category:
- Hold the Line, the sister track to Scorched Earth based on Canadian wildfire data, and featuring the voice of Fern Yip telling the extraordinary story of fighting a wildfire on her land.
Check out all the winning projects over in the Data Sonification Archive -- filter the results to 'Special collection: Sonification award' to view the full list.
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.
- It feels a little unfair picking out favourites from the Sonification Awards winners, but it's hard to not be amazed by Nessun Dharma - a sonification of COVID-19 deaths played on church bells across 7,500 square kilometres of Italy.
- Ghost in the Loop has been doing some beautiful work with field recordings, modular synths, and our Loud Numbers sonification script for the Monome Norns.
- Aura Walmer has put together a data sonification toolkit for journalists and other communicators. It's a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to explore sonification - covering concepts, methods, tools, community and more.
- Similarly, Milton Mermikides has put together a guide to sonification for composers, titled "Hidden Music". You can pick it up as an eBook right here.
- Manifest Audio's Noah Pred recently launched a set of sonification tools for Ableton that we've been experimenting with, and have found really helpful. In a blog post, Noah explores the value of using sonification to navigate "the larger flows of information and experience that shape our world".
- Finally, Lutz Bornmann has written a great blog post about turning bibliometric data into sound, citing a bunch of our work (thankyou Lutz!)
Spotted or created something we should feature here? Hit reply and tell us about it.
We'll be back in your inboxes again in a month or two, hopefully with an exciting announcement involving pretzels, soup refusals, puffy shirts, and a parking garage.
xoxox
- Miriam and Duncan