Brexit and the falling pound

Hello again. After a long recess, I decided it was time to continue. My first post is a very simple sonification. This short sonification in the BBC tracks the value of the Pound Sterling around the Brexit. The pound was rallying quite well in the run-up of the referendum but after the shock result of the Brexit victory, When the result came in, the pound went down significantly.

The Climate Symphony

The Climate Symphony, by Marty Quinn, is a multimedia performance that uses climate data from the last 110000 years. It tracks the climatological evolution over these years, sonifying several datastreams simultaneously. The music is played together with a spoken word performance by Quinn, explaining the climate evolution. Quinn developed custom software for the Climate Symphony and has developed several other sonification projects such as Shakespeare texts, the 9/11 attacks, solar images, et cetera.

Stock Exchange Piece

In Stock Exchange Piece, French musician and philosopher Matthieu Saladin took the price and the 50-day Moving Average^⁠1 of crude oil and gold during 50 days (between 4^th of March and 22^nd of April 2007, with a resolution of one datapoint for a day) and mapped them one-to-one (or unit-swapping as Saladin calls it) onto sinewaves.

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

N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella)

N.A.G. was an application that used data from the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. The user would enter search words and the application would start looking for mp3 files matching those keywords. Due to the nature of Gnutella, a mp3 file is downloaded in fragments. These fragments form the core of the musical result: Instead of mapping data, the sound files themselves are transformed based on various parameters that can be set interactively by the user. The downloaded fragments are played back at a speed depending on the available bandwidth.

Solar Wind Sonification

In 2010, a team from the University of Michigan used solar wind data from 2003, obtained using NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer Satellite. Composer Robert Alexander mapped Helium velocity data to a frequency between 20Hz and 6kHz. The resulting frequency was used to control the cutoff frequency of a bandpass filter filtering pink noise and a bandwidth that was held at a constant of 1. The result is a sweeping wind sound. The density of the Helium controls the loudness of the sound. At some points in time, a Coronal Mass Ejection^⁠1 occurs. When this happens, the sound is sent through an overdrive effect.

Rock Music: Granular and Stochastic Synthesis based on the Matanuska Glacier

Moving from social media to environmental data, today I discuss Mara Helmuth’s Rock Music, a sonification of the melting of an Alaskan glacier.

Mara Helmuth uses data from sediment granulation in a lake formed by the melting of the Matanuska glacier in Alaska during a 24-hour period. Time, grain size and grain frequency were measured and mapped onto parameters for waveform, additive, granular and physical modelling synthesis.

Listen to Wikipedia

Listen to Wikipedia sonifies and visualises activity on Wikipedia, offering limited interactivity. I have asked the authors, Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, a few questions to explain the sonification process, which they were happy to answer.

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.

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.