Listen To Data

What happens when you "visualize" data with sound? This Tumblr collects examples of data audioization.

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Stanford PhD student Nik Sawe created a musical score to reflect the decline of plant species responding to climate change. As Michelle Nijhuis writes, “The spreading silence in this “species solo” by yellow-cedar is, in effect, the sound of climate change.”

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“This is a plot about four newsrooms using the Camayak platform. We plot various indicators of readership over time.“ - This video combines visualization and audioization.

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Brian Foo turns uses the median income of residents near each subway stop to dictate the volume and type of instruments. This sonification - which is accompanied by simple and clear visuals - is somewhat abstract, in that as you listen you can’t exactly tell how the data maps to the music. Instead, it uses data to create music that evokes emotion. Find out more about Brian Foo’s work, and how he creates his data-driven tracks, at his website: https://datadrivendj.com/

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The music of Oklahoma’s earthquakes

As part of an investigation into the relationship between oil and gas development and increased seismic activity, Michael Corey of Reveal created this sonification of the past 10 years of earthquakes in Oklahoma:

Here's how Corey did it:

I ran earthquake catalog data that I downloaded from the Northern California Earthquake Data Center through some code I wrote to translate the time and magnitude of each quake into MIDI notes. Each “plink” you hear in the recording is a single earthquake in Oklahoma. The lower the pitch and the louder the note, the bigger the earthquake. Then our sound engineer Jim Briggs, who is a for-real composer, ran those notes through a synthesizer to add more musicality.

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“A pulsar is a highly magnetised neutron star, with a radius of 10-15 km, having somewhat greater mass than the Sun which has a radius of approximately 1 million km. Radiation is beamed out along the magnetic poles and pulses of radiation are received as the beam crosses the Earth, in the same manner as the beam from a lighthouse causes flashes. Being enormous cosmic flywheels with a tick attached, they make some of the best clocks known to mankind. The sounds on this web page directly correspond to the radio-waves emitted by the brightest pulsars in the sky as received by some of the largest radio telescopes in the world.”

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A Minnesota Quartet, Tuned to Temperatures from the Equator to the Arctic, Performs Global Warming

A fresh composition, meshing data and strings, creates a sonic portrait of climate change.

On Dot Earth, Andy Revkin compiles some great examples of using music to communicate climate change data, including a string quartet from the University of Minnesota and a digital violin track from Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

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Bard Edlund - “The Dow Piano”

Designer Bard Edlund created a music player that converts Dow Jones stock prices into piano music. Each note’s pitch indicates the price, and each note’s loudness indicates the trading volume.

[Image: Bard Edlund]

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NPR’s Planet Money - “U.S. Home Prices, Sung As Opera“

Planet Money converted home prices into musical notes, then found an opera singer to perform them. You can listen to them rise and fall over the past decade.

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30 Minutes West - “Early Bloom”

To evoke the process of plant communication - yes, plants talk - Peter Frick-Wright and Robbie Carver composed custom synthesizer music for their podcast. Listen to the episode below, and listen to a discussion about how and why they made the music on How Sound.

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New York Times - “Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical”

What's the difference between winning an Olympic gold medal by one second or one-hundredth of a second? This interactive from the New York Times lets you listen to the difference between a gold and a bronze medal in various Winter Olympics events like downhill skiing, bobsled and speed skating. 

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Radiolab - “Colors”

In this episode of Radiolab, a choir illustrates what the world looks like for a mantis shrimp, a "little sea creature, who with 16 color receptors, blows the rest of us earthlings out of the water."