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.

Two Trains: Sonification of Income Inequality on the NYC Subway

Two trains by American composer Brian Foo is a sonification of a subway ride to 3 of New York’s boroughs (Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx), where the median household income functions as the control data for the composition.

Playing the Lottery

Playing the lottery in plano by Australian composer Warren Burt is a composition which takes results from the New South Wales lottery.^⁠1 Each winning number consists of six digits. A modulo division is performed on these numbers to fall within a specified range.^⁠2

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.

The Rhythm of City. Sonifying social media activity in cities around the world

Rhythms of the City by the artists duo Mar Canet Sola and Varvara Guljajeva sonifies online activity in specific cities. The overall activity on Youtube, Twitter and Flickr are measured and compared to historical activity. The resulting value is mapped to a tempo value on a metronome. The more activity there is in a city, the higher the tempo of the corresponding metronome.

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.