A big update to the Sonification Art database

I have made a rather substantial update to the database. It contains now 256 projects, making it an interesting catalogue for sonification art. Besides adding new works, I also cleaned up some things. I think the database is pretty varied and can be a resource for anyone who wants to work with sonification and data-driven storytelling. Practically, I kept it as a Google Sheet. It’s not very fancy but this way you have an easy overview of all the data. You can have a look here (non-editable spreadsheet).

Conductor: the sound of the New York subway

Conductor, by Alexander Chen, is a webpage that sonifies the new York subway schedule. The webpage draws the New York subway map onscreen in order of the schedule and when a lines crosses another one,  it triggers a note, akin to pulling a string. Conductor uses a combination of HTML, Javascript and Flash.

1945-1998, Overkilled, and The Names of Experiments by Isao Hashimoto

1945-1998 (released in 2003) is a work by Isao Hashimoto that sonifies and visualises the 2053 nuclear explosions between the first nuclear test in New Mexico until the test by Pakistan in May 1998 (the three tests announced by the DPRK since 2006 are not included in the work).

AERO – Flight Time Music Generator

AERO, by Gregory Reeves, is a MacOS application, made with MaxMSP, that uses flight departure and arrival data from four airports in the USA. AERO takes these otherwise dry (and sometimes stress-inducing) data and turns it into delicate generative music. 

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.

FMS Symphony

FMS Symphony is a quirky sonification of the  US treasury balance since the 2008 financial crisis. It was released in 2012 and I asked the creators, Thomas Levine and Brian Abelson, part of CSV Soundsystem, a few questions to know more about it. 

Earth’s Magnetic Field: Realizations in Computed Electronic Sound

Earth’s Magnetic Field: Realizations in Computed Electronic Sound, is a seminal piece of sonification art and electronic music in general. In 1970, composer Charles Dodge, together with three physicists Bruce R. Boller, Carl Frederick and Stephen G. Ungar, sonified the variations in the earth’s magnetic field which in influenced by solar winds.

Massachusetts Geophonic

Massachusetts Geophonic is an application by Arvid Tomayko to sonify the geological nature of Massachusetts. Arvid Tomayko uses data from the USGS Massachusetts geological map as a palette on which the user can place markers to ‘travel’ over the map.

London Fix: making sound out of gold

About the piece

London Fix, Music Changing With the Price of Gold, An Environment of Continuous Electronic Music (2003), by the American composer Tom Hamilton, is a series of six sonifications of the gold price evolution at the London Stock Exchange. It was one of the first pieces that drew me to research sonification and hence I wanted to include this on my blog. I have asked Tom Hamilton a few question on how he got to create this work which he was very kind to answer.