Quotidian record: sonifying everyday life

Quotidian record is another sonification work by Brian House, whose work You’ll have to take my word for it, I wrote about earlier in this blog. In this highly individualistic work, Brian tracked all his travels for a year and used those data to create a composition. He suggests that “our habitual patterns have inherent musical qualities and that daily rhythms might form an emergent portrait of an individual”. In other words: life is music.

The Listening Machine

The Listening Machine was a sonification that used tweets from a group of 500 participants in the UK. The creators wanted to highlight the interesting dynamics that arise from social interactions and translate those dynamics into music, so to create “a soundtrack of our everyday social lives”. It was also inspired by the Mass Observation Movement (1937), an early British experiment in social research in which 500 volunteers were asked to keep diaries of their everyday lives.

Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony

Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony is an installation by Mathilde Lavenne that wants to be a meditation on the afterlife. Using a light sensor, the colour intensities on a black and white marble column are read and fed into the sound engine. Using marble, Laverne wants to convey a sense of solemnness.

You’ll have to take my word for it: car crash composition

Brian House created You’ll have to take my word for it, in which he sonified a car crash. In 2011, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray had a car accident but survived unharmed. The dubious circumstances in which the accident happened led to an investigation and the car’s black box data were made public.

Tweetscapes: sonifying Germany’s twitterscape

Continuing on the previous post, Tweetscapes takes on Twitter as well. However, there are notable differences. While Twinthesis can be used as an instrument and offers a few interaction possibilities, Tweetscapes is meant to be listened to, experienced without any direct possible interaction. However, the tweetscapes soundscape has been used as a base for improvisation in live music.

Twittersynth: sonifying public tweets

In this post, I discuss Twinthesis, a sonification of public Tweets.

Twinthesis (also called Twittersynth), is a Twitter sonification application, written in MaxMSP, that uses public tweets as its data source. Every 30 seconds the software pulls out the latest public tweet and converts the characters into ASCII-values.