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. 

A database of sonification works

As I discover new works, I try to get as much information as possible to write a blog post about it. Unfortunately, sometimes, I cannot get all information. I could leave those works alone and fade away in the endless ocean of data, or I can create a database of works. At least, you will be able to listen to the works yourself and maybe you can get some inspiration.