A blog on sonification in an artistic context
Steevithak @steevithak@mastodon.sdf.org shared this playlist he made about sonification of biological data. There are quite a few ones I did not know about so I will add them this week to the database.
Cover photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
O Coro dos Minerais (The Mineral Choir) is a residency project at the Museum of Mines and Metals in Belo Horizonte. As part of the Comciência program, I was selected with other artists to do a residency around the collection and the theme of the museum, using parts of their collection. Given the pandemic, some artists like me worked completely remotely and got help from the staff through Zoom sessions. With the Mineral Choir, I wanted to create sonification of minerals.
Continue reading “O Coro dos Minerais: poetic sonifications of minerals”
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).
Continue reading “A big update to the Sonification Art database”
Disclaimer: this is a work by myself and Tori Holmes, Nico Espinoza and Rafel Puetter (Rafucko). We have a dedicated website for this installation here where you can read all details about the mappings. I will give a quick introduction below and you can read more on the website. I thought it was long overdue to get a post about this work on the sonification art blog as well.
Outros Registros is a 8.1 installation that sonifies police violence in Rio de Janeiro between 2009 (when Rio was selected as the Olympic host city) and 2016. The monthly data are played back at a rhythm of 30 seconds/month and consists of three layers: A constant “drone”, made up out of individual sinewaves, represents civilian deaths, mapped onto the four geographical regions of Rio, and combined with data for the city as a whole. These frequencies beat against eachother and cause rhythms to emerge. The second layer is a bell-like sound, which juxtaposes the data on police and civilian deaths to create a kind of melody. The frequencies for each zone are converted to MIDI-notes and played with a random delay within the 30-second window. Finally, the sonification of civilian and police deaths is also mixed with a third element, the sound of a human voice reading aloud newspaper headlines relating to police violence. The different sound sources also move around the circle created by the speakers, at different speeds and in different directions. For a more detailed look at the mappings, you can read a paper here.
You can listen to a sample of the sound here:
During the second staging we made a video about the installation. This staging was linked to a workshop organised by the “Dialogues on Public Security: Experiences in Brazil and in the UK” project (link in Portuguese).
Last week, An online sonification tool called Twotone, developed by Datavized Technologies and supported by Google News Initiative, was launched. It is an excellent and easy introduction to sonification: Continue reading “TwoTone: an easy introduction to sonification”
The Poseidon Project and Fault Trace are two works by David Johnson. Both works are sonifications of seismic data but they are quite distinct.
The Poseidon Project uses 100 years of seismic data, sourced from the United States Geological Survey (which is a really good source for seismic data and geological data in general). Continue reading “The Poseidon Project and Fault Trace”
A Galaxy of Suns is a mobile application (for Android and iOS) that sonifies the positions of stars in relation to the user’s location on earth, based on the GPS data in the phone. Data are sourced from the Hipparchos astronomical catalogue, which contains data about 118000 stars. Give that only approximately 5000 are visible to the human eye, this dataset offers a wealth of information. The creators’ objective was (I particularly like this phrase) to “connect audiences with otherwise invisible motions of the galaxy”. The app creates a neverending, continuous soundscape, as the galaxy never stops moving.
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. Continue reading “Conductor: the sound of the New York subway”
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). Continue reading “1945-1998, Overkilled, and The Names of Experiments by Isao Hashimoto”
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. Continue reading “AERO – Flight Time Music Generator”
Sonification Art 