Posts tagged sonification

“1945-1998” by Isao Hashimoto: CTBTO Preparatory Commission

Every nuclear explosion from 1945–1998, displayed on a map and sonified. It’s kind of transfixing. The beginning is a little slow (in a formal sense, not a “there should be more explosions” sense), but definitely click ahead to watch the cold war era intensification.

[Just returned from a vacation, blogging density increase imminent, maybe even rebooting my thesis posts.]

(via @protman)

Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun. They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

In other cases they behave more like soundwaves as they travel through a wind instrument. Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear.

(via Telegraph)

This interactive data sonification feature from the New York Times is fantastic. It is a perfect case for the usefulness of sonification: hearing the close finishes of the Olympic races really gives you a better sense of just how close they are, even compared to watching them!

This interactive data sonification feature from the New York Times is fantastic. It is a perfect case for the usefulness of sonification: hearing the close finishes of the Olympic races really gives you a better sense of just how close they are, even compared to watching them!

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

72 plays

This is the sound of a Mars rover, sort of. There are no microphones on the rovers (why not?!), but this is the data from their accelerometers, sped up until it is in the audible range, about 1000x. That means that in the full hour-long file you can get of rover Opportunity at NASA’s site is actually 2143 Martian days long! (That’s Jan. 24, 2004 to Feb. 2, 2010 on Earth.)

(via NASA)

Nathalie Miebach is a sculptor who makes “sculptural musical scores” based on weather data. If that sounds confusing, imagine how you might play the sculpture pictured above. Apparently the process goes: gather weather data, make into score that looks like this, and then make either a sculpture or music from it. She’s got a lot of pictures of her sculptures on her website. (I like how “data” is in her list of media for the sculptures.)

Nathalie Miebach is a sculptor who makes “sculptural musical scores” based on weather data. If that sounds confusing, imagine how you might play the sculpture pictured above. Apparently the process goes: gather weather data, make into score that looks like this, and then make either a sculpture or music from it. She’s got a lot of pictures of her sculptures on her website.

(I like how “data” is in her list of media for the sculptures.)

This is an interesting idea (although the video does seem to drag after a while): use some sort of magic microphones to capture the sounds (and I think magnetic interference) of a computer in operation.

A great idea with a sort of middling execution: taking stellar data and using it to generate a musical clock. A Wheel of Stars. It seems like the data could produce something much more vibrant than this. (via Califaudio) update: blast! scooped by boingboing (and they love it!). That’s what I get for queueing up posts.

A great idea with a sort of middling execution: taking stellar data and using it to generate a musical clock. A Wheel of Stars.

It seems like the data could produce something much more vibrant than this.

(via Califaudio)

update: blast! scooped by boingboing (and they love it!). That’s what I get for queueing up posts.

This is a great example of pulling musical content out of non-musical data.

(Although there are other ways to make music with birds and wire)

Ohio is a Piano?

Andy Woodruff, upon realizing that Ohio has 88 counties and a piano 88 keys, made a flash toy to explore the coincidence. You can play the counties manually one at a time, play an actual song to see which counties light up, play demographic data, play metro areas as chords (!), or play the route between two cities as a string of notes. The notes are assigned in alphabetical order by default, but you can change them to reflect a particular demographic data set.

Andy seems to think that “most of it sounds like crap,” but when you’re playing the route from Akron to Zanesville with notes assigned by percent of the population over 65, I’m not sure that traditional musicality could ever really be your reference point.

Geoff Manaugh on BLDGBLOG takes it his usual step further:

Perhaps the penultimate scene in some unreleased Alfred Hitchcock film, buried in a voice-encrypted vault outside Los Angeles, involves the playing of a sinister piano tune – slow, atonal, and non-repetitive – which our hero soon realizes is, in fact, a coded spy’s map of Ohio: inside the song are directions, forming a county by county guide to how to smuggle nuclear secrets through the Buckeye State…
A new form of paranoia arises, in which you think that all songs are actually maps. Even that burst of bird song that you hear in the alley behind your house at 3am is, you conclude, an unacknowledged spy’s cartography, full of secrets to those who can decode it.

It is an entirely delightful little application (especially the metro chords and route melodies), so you should go and play with it.

(via BLDGBLOG)

More about brain-activity sonification, this time based on MRIs instead of EEGs. I think it’s interesting how the sound of this project is much more compelling than the last one; I wonder how much of this is due to the choice of slow attack/decay synth sounds over a MIDI piano, and how much is due to the type of data they receive. At least in the first example in the video, the data is quite digital: on and off for various areas of the brain, depending on whether their activity passes a certain threshold. EEG data, being more of a continuous line, you might expect to have a less discrete sound. Just sending MIDI data to a new synth can change a lot! (via SynthGear)

More about brain-activity sonification, this time based on MRIs instead of EEGs. I think it’s interesting how the sound of this project is much more compelling than the last one; I wonder how much of this is due to the choice of slow attack/decay synth sounds over a MIDI piano, and how much is due to the type of data they receive.

At least in the first example in the video, the data is quite digital: on and off for various areas of the brain, depending on whether their activity passes a certain threshold. EEG data, being more of a continuous line, you might expect to have a less discrete sound. Just sending MIDI data to a new synth can change a lot!

(via SynthGear)